


would have wanted it for myself

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2019 [3]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: (of a sort), (sort of), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Dorothea goes looking for a purpose in life that she actually finds fulfilling, Fictober 2019, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Melusine and Mercedes make cameos, Not big enough to get character tags, Triggers, foster parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-20 22:14:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21064034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Wariness warred with concern, but Dorothea had concerns beyond her assessment that one of her fellow students seemed very off, somehow.AKA: Dorothea and Dimitri get a support chain. [Written for Fictober 2019.]





	would have wanted it for myself

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Fictober 2019, prompt “Listen. No, really listen.”
> 
> [**CN/TW**: Oblique allusions to attempted kidnapping, rape, and murder; split-second reference to sex trafficking; misogyny; child labor]

“Come on, where did I leave it?”

Life in Garreg Mach Monastery both was and was not what Dorothea had thought it would be. She had fully expected that her classwork in the Officers Academy would be as difficult as it had turned out to be. Having to ferret out the time to study in between rehearsals and performances might have exaggerated the difficulty somewhat, but there had been no denying that the study materials for the entrance exam had been _hard _to get a grasp on—especially considering how lacking Dorothea’s formal education had been up to that point. And just as Dorothea had expected, there were plenty of eligible men here, though just like the men she had met through the opera, they were largely lacking in the attributes she wanted in a husband.

Nothing had quite been able to prepare her for just how _big _the monastery was. Enbarr dwarfed it in size; that was true enough. In Enbarr, you could walk from dawn to dusk and still find yourself in the city, something Dorothea knew from personal experience. The first free day she had, Dorothea had timed how long it took to get from one end of the monastery compound to the other, and discounting the areas sealed off from the students, it had taken about three hours. Nothing to Enbarr’s size, and yet it was massive for a single compound. None of the churches in Enbarr (not that Dorothea had ever visited too many of those, and certainly not for their intended purposes) had been anything like this. A lot of the students who had been admitted to one of the trade schools on the monastery grounds had taken to carrying around maps.

It was so much cleaner here than anywhere else Dorothea had lived, too. The slums in Enbarr needed no description; the less said about them, the better. As Dorothea had slowly risen in the ranks of the Mittelfrank Opera Company, her accommodations had slowly gotten better. But even the quarters she had been occupying when she left the opera were cramped, dingy, and carried an odor of mildew that all the rosemary in the world couldn’t mask. That was the first room she had lived in graced with a window, and it had served as the sole source of ventilation. There had been no running water, and while Dorothea would readily admit that free admission to the nearest bathhouse beat bathing in a fountain any day, she had never been terribly pleased with the concept of public bathing.

Dorothea’s room in the dormitories had been spotless when she entered it for the first time. She was expected to keep it clean herself, but that was only fair; the fact that someone had bothered to clean it before she took up residence was a lot more than she had been expecting. Beyond that, there was the simple lack of trash on the walkways or outside of the dining hall; every bit of waste was taken away so quickly that there wasn’t even a whiff of garbage left in the air. And Dorothea still wasn’t enamored of public bathing, but there wasn’t so much as a spot of scum or algae on the baths set aside for the female students at the Officers Academy, and that made a world of difference.

And her things went missing so much less often, too.

Dorothea had learned early on that a slum-dweller shouldn’t get too attached to their things-and that they should never amass more than they can comfortably carry around with them. As soon as you picked up something others might think valuable and then took your eyes off of it, it would be gone, and good luck getting it back.

(Dorothea had inflicted that fate on others, from time to time. She wasn’t proud of it. She never would be. But she had been young, without family, and usually starving, and it wasn’t as if her fellow slum-dwellers _wouldn’t _have robbed her of every last bite of food she ever ate if they had half the chance. Gutters are not a place you should ever go looking for honor in. You won’t find it.)

Even starting out in the opera, things hadn’t been a lot better. Once she’d risen up the ranks a bit, no one would have dared steal from her, but when she was starting out, the other girls had swiped her stuff just as much as they swiped each other’s. She knew why they did it—they were just as poor and hungry as she was, trying to make extra money to buy more food with, or else to send on to their families, if they had families—but that didn’t make it easier to bear.

Not once had Dorothea come back to her room after class to find it broken into. Not once had she had to track down the local sellers of black market goods—and yes, there _was _a black market in Garreg Mach, however much the authorities might try to deny its existence—to see if any of her belongings had found their way into their hands. She still locked her door whenever she went out, but it was nice to be able to let her guard down some.

Dorothea hadn’t thought she’d let her guard down enough to start mislaying her things.

Alas.

She’d been given that brooch by a member of the scenery crew when she first joined the opera company. Dorothea had never been able to tell if it was actually silver or not as the giver had claimed, but it was one of the few gifts she’d been given in her life that had been given with no ulterior motives, and she was fond of it. And now, she’d lost it. The clasp had gotten looser over the years she’d had it, but this would be the first time it had ever just fallen off of her jacket. But there had to be a first time for everything, right?

Right. Dorothea just wished she’d heard it hit the ground when it fell off.

She’d looked everywhere. Combed over her classroom, and confirmed with Edie that it had still been on her jacket when she came in for class that morning. Turned her room upside down, and thoroughly spooked poor Bern in the process; she thought the noise from the room next door was an assassin trying to knock the wall down to get to her. (Bern’s wailing had brought a couple of guards running, oops.) The staff in the dining hall didn’t know anything about a brooch; neither did any of the merchants in the market place. That left Dorothea scouring anywhere and everywhere she had been during the day. And she had covered a _lot _of ground today.

This place was huge. Dorothea had known that on an intellectual level from her first day here. But the full weight of how huge the monastery was hadn’t descended on her until she was stuck trying to find something so small in its vast space.

The setting sun painted the Oghma Mountains a rich crimson as Dorothea entered the cathedral. Unlike the churches in Enbarr, the cathedral in Garreg Mach didn’t hold evening services except for on saints’ days, so when Dorothea stepped past the massive oaken doors, she found the cathedral mostly empty. As opposed to the hustle and bustle that had reigned during choir practice, there were only a few people scattered about, praying before the altar or sitting in the pews. Well, at least this time there were less people around to look at her like she was some sort of madwoman as she tried to find her brooch.

Just covering the cathedral took some time, and the light began to fade as she searched it up and down. A monk came and began to light the lanterns hung up on poles at various points in the cathedral; as night fell deeper and deeper, the lanterns became little islands of light in a sea of dense gloom. Still, Dorothea searched. She had class tomorrow morning, but she’d never had much trouble getting by on less sleep than was strictly speaking _recommended_. She’d needed to learn how to get by on less sleep once she was in the opera; rehearsals and studying and everything else in her life kept her up late into the night. And if her brooch was somewhere in the cathedral, and she left finding it to tomorrow, she might never find it at all; the custodians came to sweep the floor and clean up any messes they could find very early in the morning, and if they saw the brooch, they’d probably assume someone careless had thrown away something they didn’t want anymore, and take it to keep for themselves, or sell.

As the last light of day disappeared over the mountaintops, Dorothea began trying to reconcile herself to the possibility that she might not find her brooch at all. And quickly discovered that it was significantly harder to reconcile herself to losing something of hers now than it had been when she was living in the opera house, or the slums. How lovely.

Dorothea was just considering doubling back for the dining hall, when she spotted someone sitting in one of the pews.

There was no one else left in the cathedral. Dorothea had heard Mercedes talking about how much more peaceful it was to pray late at night, when there were fewer people around, but one look at the figure sitting out of the light of the lanterns, cloaked in shadow, told her that that was _not _Mercedes. He—it was clearly a man, as far as Dorothea was concerned—sat in the third row of pews from the front, far from any of the lanterns, perfectly silent. He wasn’t sitting up straight, not exactly; his back was straight as a ramrod, but he was listing slightly to one side, as if on the verge of sleep.

Frowning, Dorothea drew nearer. This garnered no reaction. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought she was looking at a statue.

The closer she got to the man, the more concerned she became at his total lack of reaction. Was he sick, or injured? She wondered how long she would have to walk to find someone who could help her with him, if either was the case; she was starting to learn healing magic from Manuela (though she was still trying to push past her dislike of faith magic in general), but she was still at a level of proficiency which barred her from using it on patients unsupervised. She would have been stuck trying to find someone who could help, or just trying to find a way to get him up to the infirmary herself.

Then, she got close enough to him to make out his features despite the gloom.

“Dimitri?”

She didn’t know him well. The house leaders in the Officers Academy tended to stick to their own classes, instead of intermingling with students from the other houses. Of the three of them, Claude was the only one who really seemed curious about the students outside of his own house, and he was glib enough that Dorothea wasn’t too interested in getting into a conversation—or a sort of verbal puzzle, as any conversation with Claude was likely to become—with him. She hadn’t really approached Dimitri before, either, but for different reasons.

Now, though, it looked like there was something wrong, and Dorothea had little difficulty pushing past what had held her back before to approach him. “Dimitri?” she called out again. She kept walking until she was standing close by, and tilted her head to get a closer look at his face. His eyes were open, but they didn’t really seem to see. He was just staring ahead, into space. “Are you… asleep?”

But no, he wasn’t asleep. Dorothea wasn’t sure what had done it—the question posed to the empty air, or the sound of footfalls finally drawing too close to be ignored—but Dimitri started, his eyes snapping to her face. She couldn’t make out the expression in them, but she could see that his eyes weren’t entirely clear.

“I…” He paused long enough to clear his throat, throat bulging noticeably as he swallowed. “Forgive me, Dorothea. I did not hear you.” And just as quickly as he’d started, Dimitri was on his feet, forcing a smile on his face that made the hairs on the back of Dorothea’s neck stand on end. “Did you need something?”

Dorothea wondered if taking a step back would be telegraphing too plainly. “No, I’m fine. I was just looking for something.”

“Oh, do you need any help?”

She shook her head, a tad more forcefully than she had intended. “Really, I’m fine. Are _you _okay, though?” Dorothea frowned deeply. “You look a bit pale.” _Really_ pale, actually, if it was obvious enough for her to pick up on in the gloom of this part of the cathedral.

He smiled again, more weakly, more naturally, and that lopsided smile actually made Dorothea relax a little. But only a little. “Please, don’t be concerned; I lost track of time. Forgive me, but I must return to my quarters.”

And with that, he left.

Dorothea was surprised by how much her lungs hurt when she let out a breath. Maybe she shouldn’t have been.

-0-0-0-

Even to this day, charity surprised Dorothea. She was surrounded by those who were not just accustomed to it, but _expected _it, but it still had the power to surprise her. Does that surprise _you_? It shouldn’t. It really shouldn’t. Most things in Dorothea’s life, both what she experienced and what she witnessed, had been transactional. Both sides upheld their side of the bargain, whether that was spoken or unspoken, and everything was fine. If someone reneged, even without realizing that that was what they were doing, the deal was off. It was ruthless logic, but simple, easily-understood. When someone offered to do something for you, apparently with no strings attached, that was when you needed to be wary.

Dorothea hadn’t expected the number of young orphans she found running around the monastery grounds. That all of them, barring the very young and the very frail, had been put to work, surprised her less.

But it wasn’t like _they _didn’t have free time, too.

“So, just what is it you all do around here?”

Teaching the interested ones how to sew and embroider had been Mercedes’s idea, and ultimately, Dorothea had been the only taker. Bern didn’t want to interact with that many people at once, and Hilda had quickly found somewhere else she needed to be. A lot of the kids without families running around here didn’t know how to sew—actually, it didn’t appear as if _any _facet of their education, besides religious instruction, was paid all that much attention. And so, whenever they could both find the time, Dorothea and Mercedes took their seats on the low wall blocking off the plaza in the town where all the town’s children liked to play, and as best they could, they taught.

“Chop firewood.”

“Clean the floors.”

“Pull up weeds.”

And many other tasks floated into the air. Because here was something else Dorothea hadn’t been counting on (not at first): just how many of the monastery’s orphans would flock to their side, and not even because they wanted to learn how to sew.

Beside her, Mercedes giggled, smiling down at the small army of children that had gathered around, perched on the mossy stone wall at their sides, or standing or sitting on the ground in front of them. “My, you’re all so hard-working,” she praised, and they all perked up so much at that that Dorothea had to wonder how long it had been since they’d last heard any such thing. “I’m surprised you all don’t want to go and play after working so hard.”

Dorothea… wasn’t, actually, not if the suspicions murmuring in the back of her mind were something that could bear fruit. She looked at some of the younger ones, Kadri and Ainārs, and six-year-old, near-silent Vilmantè sitting at her left-hand side (where she always sat, every time), and she thought of herself at their age. Once she had stopped to think about it, this didn’t surprise her at all.

And because it didn’t surprise her, there were so few things Dorothea could let show on her face. (They deserved more than the festering cuts inflicted by sight of an adult’s turmoil.) She was a performer, and she could make her face do what she wanted, so she smiled at them all without the slightest flaw or twitch in her lips. “Anybody want to show me what you’ve done since last time?”

The chorus of “me!”s that surged up was pretty gratifying. She’d admit it.

As today’s ‘lesson’ got underway, Dorothea wondered gloomily how much good she could do any of these kids like this. She’d be here until the end of the year, and that was it. Garreg Mach wasn’t working out as a place to find a suitable husband, and if she didn’t want to end up alone, she was going to have to go looking elsewhere. She’d be gone, and what little support she had been giving these kids would be gone, too.

_It’s always conditional on something, isn’t it? Either it isn’t free, or it can’t be given freely. Not that I could make much of a—_

Grinning, Kadri showed Dorothea a flower she had embroidered onto an old handkerchief Dorothea had given her to practice on at the end of the last lesson. It was a bit clumsily done, but it looked like it was a rose. Where Kadri had found such rich red thread, Dorothea didn’t know, but the rose was as red as any that had adorned the flower gardens of Enbarr.

“I made this for you!” she chirped.

Dorothea was a performer, and could name a thousand different emotions and expressions and inflections if you cared to quiz her on them. She could modulate her reactions with the best of them, and present a mask to the world so perfect that no one could guess that the actor felt something other than what emotions the character she played expressed. When she accepted that handkerchief back, there was a knot in her throat that had no origin in anything but her own heart.

_Is there nothing I can do?_

This went on. The children were always so reluctant to let them leave, even after an hour or two had passed. Dorothea thought that might be more down to Mercedes than to anything else. Mercedes wore the maternal attitude like it had been made especially for her; she always knew just what to say and just how to act to engage with their ‘students’, or to put them at their ease, or to cheer them up. If she ever had children of her own, she’d likely put all other mothers in the area to shame. (If—_when_, hopefully—Dorothea had children of her own, she hoped she remembered enough of how Mercedes had handled these kids to put those lessons into action.)

The clear blue skies—the skies over Garreg Mach were so much _bluer_ than the skies Dorothea had been accustomed to in Enbarr—were just starting to turn to bronze when Melusine appeared out of one of the alleyways leading to the street that bordered the plaza.

It was odd thinking of her as ‘Professor.’ It was easy enough to _call _her ‘Professor,’ but Melusine was clearly not a whole lot older than Dorothea and the other students, if that, and her demeanor was… Her demeanor was hard to put into words. She wasn’t overly familiar (except for a few odd moments, which Dorothea honestly thought might have been accidental), but her demeanor wasn’t what Dorothea would have expected from a professor at a prestigious academy like this one, either. She certainly wasn’t anything like Manuela or Professor Hanneman, and only part of that could be chalked up to her background as a mercenary, instead of a singer or an academic.

Dorothea hadn’t thought Melusine would be much for young children.

Funnily enough, when the kids surrounding Dorothea and Mercedes spotted Melusine, they promptly proved Dorothea wrong and swarmed her.

It was difficult to pick out anything intelligible from the cacophony as the kids started asking Melusine (who was looking more than a little overwhelmed, if that furrowed brow and those wide eyes wasn’t supposed to indicate anything else) about what seemed like a thousand different things at once. After a few seconds, Dorothea got the impression that it was something to do with swordplay; that seemed to be the recurring theme, here.

“You must be patient,” Melusine told them, quietly, firmly. “I need to speak with Mercedes and Dorothea first.”

So Melusine needed to speak with her. Great. Not that Dorothea didn’t _like _Melusine; once you were able to see past that quiet, often expressionless shell, she was a kinder person than Dorothea would have expected, and she was also the primary reason Dorothea was currently trying to give faith magic a shot. But she had a very, _very _piercing gaze, and being stared at like someone knew every last ugly thought and impulse to cross her mind wasn’t… It wasn’t pleasant. The fact that she knew Melusine wasn’t doing it to be judgmental made it worse. (She didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t even want to consider what it meant.)

All of Dorothea’s apprehension couldn’t stop Melusine from walking up to them, though. Vilmantè suddenly pressed her face tightly into Dorothea’s side, hiding it from view. Dorothea barely registered that, though, and she could only breathe an internal sigh of relief when Melusine first turned her attention to Mercedes. Or, at least, that it was divided evenly between herself and Mercedes.

“I am sorry to interrupt,” she murmured. “I didn’t realize you two had been teaching them as well.”

Dorothea envied anyone who could genuinely smile as serenely as Mercedes; one of these days, she was going to have to get her to spill what her trick was. “That’s okay, Professor; I think they were starting to get a little tired of sewing for today, anyways. So you’ve been teaching them how to fight with a sword?”

Melusine nodded. “That’s right.”

Mercedes tilted her head ever so slightly, reaching up to brush a stray lock of peach-blonde hair away from her face. “Are you doing that all by yourself? I know you’re a teacher, but that’s quite a lot of students to take on at once.”

Melusine turned her head back momentarily to look at the children who were all staring at her with a mixture of impatience and glee. “There…” Her mouth twisted. “There are more of them than there were last time,” she said, very quietly. “Dimitri’s around here somewhere; I—“ she craned her neck, and pointed. “There he is.”

And there he was, standing at the edge of the alleyway, looking more than a little awkward as he watched on. Dorothea wondered why he wouldn’t come any closer than that, if he was a part of all this, too.

Dorothea might have questioned, if only to herself, why Dimitri wouldn’t come over, but Melusine either didn’t think to question it, or just didn’t feel like she had the time. “I am to inform you both that tonight’s faith magic class will start half an hour later than usual. We have a faculty meeting later today,” she explained, “and Professor Manuela will be late.”

“Okay.” Mercedes smiled again. “Thank you for warning us; I would have hated to get there and found the classroom empty.”

Melusine nodded to her. Then, she turned to Dorothea. “Dorothea, I…” Dorothea watched, stomach churning slightly, as Melusine dug around in the pockets of her houppelande. “I…” She pulled something out of one of those pockets. “I think this is yours.”

Relief nearly choked out her breath when Dorothea saw what she was holding: the silver brooch she had lost a couple of weeks back. “You found it?” she all but gasped, taking the brooch into her hands. “Thank you so much; I’ve been looking everywhere for it.”

Dorothea smiled down at the brooch—_I’m definitely never letting you out of my sight again_—but just as soon as she had started smiling, she stopped, puzzled. The surface of the brooch wasn’t level, and so trying to use it as a makeshift mirror was a fool’s errand, but unless Dorothea was mistaken, she thought she could make out the shattered bits and pieces of her reflection more clearly than before. “Professor.” She blinked. “Did you…”

“It had gotten dirty.” And unless Dorothea was very much mistaken, Melusine looked—and sounded—a little embarrassed. “Silver tarnishes easily when left out in the open. I thought I should clean it before finding its owner.” A deep line dug in between her eyebrows. “Have I damaged it?”

“No!” Dorothea said quickly, shaking her head violently. “I just…” Huh, look at that; a performer who couldn’t find any words. How her fellows in the opera would have laughed, if they could see her now. She struggled for a few moments, before finally, out of the depths, “…Thank you so much, Professor.” Her voice was quiet as she spoke. She couldn’t manage anything louder.

Melusine nodded. Her eyes strayed briefly to Vilmantè, still glued to Dorothea’s side and hiding her face. She bit her lip, but said nothing, instead turning to the crowd waiting impatiently for her to head off with them for the training grounds. Her progress back to the alley was slow—the kids didn’t seem to understand that she wouldn’t get _anywhere _quickly so long as they swarmed her like that. Dimitri watched on in silence the whole time, a faint smile on his face that Dorothea recognized after a moment as wistful. Why he would be, she didn’t know.

(She’d think about it later. Much later, she’d be thinking about it a lot.)

Beside her, Mercedes sighed softly. When Dorothea turned her attention to her, Mercedes’s lips were pursed as she put her things away. Her brow was knit in a way Dorothea didn’t remember ever before seeing on her face.

“Hey.” Dorothea tried for a smile; the return of her brooch seemed to have come in exchange for all her training as a performer. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you make a face like that before. What’s wrong?”

Mercedes took a deep, shuddering breath, her torso quivering as she shrugged. “Oh, it’s nothing much.”

“I’d still like to hear it, if you’re willing to share.”

Autumn was approaching, and the breeze that found them was cold as Mercedes set her bag heavily down on her lap. “You’ll probably think I’m silly.” What smile crept now over her lips certainly was rueful. “I just wish we didn’t live in a world where children that young have to learn how to fight.”

Dorothea’s stomach clenched, sending a warm wave of almost-nausea up her throat. “Yeah. Me, too.”

Mercedes left her, then, and Dorothea started to pack up her own things. It _was _getting late, and she’d like to get in some homework before heading on to the dining hall for supper. How much of the assignment she’d been given today could she get done, she wondered. It wasn’t due until Friday, but Dorothea had never liked leaving things to the last minute.

She started to get up to go, but a small hand latched tightly onto her jacket sleeve.

Vilmantè stared up at her. She was six years old, underfed, and tiny, and her gray eyes were hard as stone, the sort of hardness any adult would have been hard-pressed to match.

“They killed my dad,” Vilmantè said flatly.

The words didn’t quite sink in, not all at once. “Vilmantè, what are—“

“They killed my dad,” she said again, more insistently.

And this time, when she spoke the words, they sunk in, hard and heavy as a millstone thrown into a well, and Dorothea remembered, quite clearly, the first month of the school year. Back then, she’d thought it strange that the Blue Lions were being sent out to kill a bunch of bandits, especially right out of the gate. Even after everything she’d experienced in Enbarr, she’d thought it strange that the church would place so much importance on killing as all that. (Her education had been lacking. She had learned better since then, and she hoped, so much, that once she was gone from this place, she would never be washing sticky, congealed blood off of her hands again.)

That’s right. Lady Rhea had ordered the Knights of Seiros to collect the thieves’ children and bring them back here, hadn’t she?

Dorothea stared down at her, reaching in vain for anything she could say that would soothe a broken heart, quiet a raging spirit, but nothing came to mind. She had been six years old, once. She had been hurt, often, and she knew just how elusive justice was for the poor, for the orphan, for the powerless.

And there was something else, as well.

_“Punishing the wicked is the sacred duty of the faithful.”_

So, it wasn’t just about finding the words to soothe the pain or gentle the rage, was it?

“I’m… I’m so sorry,” Dorothea said falteringly. “But they didn’t have a choice. We can’t disobey orders from the Archbishop.”

Vilmantè nodded, but those stony eyes of hers softened not at all.

_Is there nothing I can do?_

-0-0-0-

Enbarr didn’t really have what most would call a proper winter. Dorothea had never seen snow up close; the closest she’d come was looking at the white-capped peaks of the Oghma Mountains, and before that, it had been the operas set in vistas where snow might fall. Members of the stage crew would climb up into the scaffolding with burlap sacks full of cotton fluff, and then carefully shake it out the moment they got their cue. It would float gently down, pure white the first night of the performance, and then an increasingly dingy gray the more nights the performance dragged on without the fluff being replaced. When that fluff had fallen down around her, catching in her hair and clinging to her costume, Dorothea had wondered wistfully about how beautiful real snow must be.

Now, she was wearing her shawl everywhere she went, wincing when even the thick wool of it couldn’t shield her from the cold, and Dorothea was thinking that if this was what the Horsebow Moon was like this far north, winter was going to be unrestrained _hell_.

And yet, classes and life in general went on, so she had no choice but to go out in it. She wrapped her shawl (wine-violet wool, shot through with silver thread, something she’d bought in her third year with the opera, and then rarely worn for fear it would be stolen; it was cheap-looking compared to the shawls Hilda and Marianne had brought from home with them, but she refused to be ashamed of it) around her shoulders every morning, wondered how much longer it would be before she was reaching for her careworn old coat instead, and went about her life. She’d survived the slums, hadn’t she? The cold of a northern autumn wasn’t going to bring her down.

When the rain came, the cold’s clutching fingers turned to rending claws. There didn’t need to be that much wind, even; when the rain came, the cold just seeped down past your skin and into your blood and your bones, turning both to ice. It robbed you of any warmth you might have found and ripped that stolen warmth to shreds right in front of you. And yes, maybe Dorothea was being a little melodramatic, but this was taking all the joy out of being outside somewhere clean. And she needed to be outside, right now. They all did.

She didn’t know Flayn all that well. Honestly, for all that the girl seemed very open, she tended to stick to topics of conversation that revealed nothing substantive about herself. Took one to know one, Dorothea supposed; she was just the same, a lot of the time. Dorothea couldn’t claim to know Flayn all that well, but she didn’t think she would have just run off without giving any word of where she was going.

And yet, for two weeks now, there had been no sign of Flayn anywhere within the monastery, the town, or any of the nearby villages. Her silence grew more ominous with each passing day, Seteth’s pallor grew more deathly, and the sick weight in the pit of Dorothea’s stomach grew heavier. (She felt like she’d swallowed a millstone. She felt like she’d swallowed the whole world.)

Flayn, it was generally agreed, was a pretty girl. Dorothea could remember being an opera singer who, it was generally agreed, was a pretty girl. She could remember all of the things lecherous men had assumed it was okay to do to a pretty girl.

She really, really hoped she was the one who found whoever it was who’d taken Flayn, if only so she could beat them black and blue. But for now, just _finding _her was far more important than that. (Dorothea remembered what those men had intended to do with her once they had her; they were rarely quiet about their intentions, varied as they were, once they thought they had the upper hand. She doubted the goddess would ever grant her the mercy of forgetting. They had to find Flayn, and quickly.)

They’d already searched the cathedral thoroughly, and it was, as it ever was at this time of night, quite poorly lit. Dorothea could hear no voices as she walked slowly through its cavernous depths, but the rain that fell outside, however gentle it might have seemed when she was outside in it, was turned to a pounding roar by the high, vaulted ceiling. If there were people out of sight, talking to each other or themselves, unless they shouted, she probably wouldn’t have heard a word of it until she got within half a foot of them. That didn’t bode well for searching. Especially if, by some bizarre, remote chance, Flayn’s kidnappers happened to be somewhere in here.

There was another factor she needed to consider when looking around, and it was one that saw her looking towards the door: the new curfew. The curfew had been put in place after Flayn was kidnapped and it was confirmed that there was more to these rumors running around of a ‘Death Knight’ than just some students’ fever dreams. It made sense, as much as it chafed. There was somebody running around attacking and kidnapping students and someone who was the same age as the students; it just made more sense to get all of the students piled away into the dormitories by a certain time of night. That made it easier to keep an eye on them, make sure none of the rest of them went missing, too. (She appreciated the caring, as much as it chafed. Maybe it was just meant to keep noble parents from raising a stink, but it was still caring, of a sort.)

Curfew came down in half an hour, and no one had been particularly clear about what the punishment for breaking curfew would be. Seteth was usually the one who handled stuff like that, but he was in no state to do anything but fret. When uncertainty was the order of the day, Dorothea wasn’t particularly interested in testing the boundaries of this new rule. When uncertainty was the order of the day, _anything _could be lurking on the other side of the border.

Tomorrow. She’d search again, tomorrow.

Dorothea turned back from the alcove where stood the Saints’ statues, heading for the center aisle—the best-lit part of the cathedral—to leave. She’d left her umbrella on the floor by the door, and was fairly certain she’d find it still sitting there. Even in Enbarr, it was rare for people to go after umbrellas when they were looking for something to steal.

As she was walking down the center aisle, though, a shadow denser than the rest caught her sight, and this time, when she turned to the figure sitting off to the side, cloaked in shadow and utterly still, she didn’t have to guess who it was.

“Dimitri?” Just as the last time she’d found him like this, Dorothea got no response, but she couldn’t just _leave _him, could she? “It’s curfew time soon; we’ve got to _go_.”

He started, whipping his head around to where she stood. For all the gloom, Dorothea could make out his eyes clearly, and…

She took a step back. She wouldn’t be coming any closer until she was certain he recognized her.

The silence stretched out, like thread pulled far too tightly over a loom—if ever it snapped, it would do so violently, and suddenly. Dorothea was wondering just how resistant Dimitri was to thunder magic. Maybe it would be enough to shock him back to his senses if—

“I… Dorothea?”

His voice was a bit uneven, as if awakening from sleep, and Dorothea couldn’t help but be relieved. _Oh, _that’s _what that was_. “Taking a nap?” She laughed lightly, or tried to. “Believe me, Dimitri, I know all about sneaking into churches so you can sleep somewhere dry, but if you have a bed of your own, you should really try sleeping there, instead.”

“I… wasn’t asleep.” So stiff did he seem as he got to his feet, like an old man—or a wounded one—that even if he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d clearly been there a long time. “I saw something flashing in the dark.”

“Yeah, that was probably this.” Dorothea plucked at her shawl with cold, clumsy fingers. “My fashion sense at fourteen ran towards the flashy.” She frowned. “You really shouldn’t stick around here much longer. Our curfew’s up in about thirty minutes.”

Overhead, the hammering on the roof grew louder—if Dorothea didn’t know better, she would have sworn someone was throwing rocks on it—and Dimitri’s face formed a mask of near-panic that would have been amusing if this place wasn’t so dark and so cold, and that face hadn’t come straight out of nowhere. “I must return to the dormitories,” he muttered.

“And that’s where I’m going, too. Come on.”

By the time they reached the doorway that led out to the bridge, the open night revealed what the pounding on the roof had foretold: the rain was up, and with it, the wind had come roaring from the north. The little twinkling stars that were the lanterns kept lit through the night across the bridge shed just enough light on wet and dying leaves to reveal the slim tress on the far side of the bridge being buffeted back and forth by the angry wind.

Well, it wasn’t as if Dorothea hadn’t needed a bath, but she would really have preferred the water be warm.

Beside her, Dimitri regarded the rain and howling wind with the distaste of someone who didn’t exactly want an ice bath, either. A spike of fellow-feeling pierced Dorothea’s chest unexpectedly, and it saw her retrieving her umbrella and pressing its scratched handle into his hand. “Come on,” she said lightly. “Let’s get out of here before one of the knights can come along and yell at us.”

Dimitri smiled in relief when he saw what she’d pressed into his hand. “Yes, let’s.”

She’d tried orchestrating this kind of thing with men, before; Hilda would have teased for days if she could have seen them now. Dorothea wasn’t keen on the idea of taking this in the direction she would have liked to take it with certain of those other men. She was having to spit her hair out of her mouth every other second, and if that couldn’t kill a mood, nothing could. But more than anything else, it was the man himself that gave her pause.

There was something off. Not for nothing had Dorothea survived for so long first in the slums, then in the opera. You _had _to develop a sense for these things if you wanted to dodge the trafficker or the murderer. You had to develop a sense for which of your admirers had only innocent intentions, and which had malign. Dorothea was skilled enough by now that she could smell a creep a mile off, and she only had to be around someone for a few minutes to tell if there was something off.

And there _was _something off about Dimitri. Dorothea had watched him spar in the training grounds, and he was controlled, so carefully controlled, but there was something behind that control that she did not like. (She would never have accepted an offer to spar if it came from him. From Edie or Claude, any day of the week. From Dimitri, never.) Beyond the training ground, he was so carefully, meticulously polite, and there was something behind that, too. Dorothea could not tell, exactly, what lied behind the mask. She dreaded the day it was peeled back.

What Dorothea _could _tell was that whatever it was lurking behind mild eyes and a courteous smile, it wasn’t the darkness she had known in the slums, or the lightless shadows cast by the glittering lights of the opera stage. She wasn’t stupid enough to put herself out there before _that _kind of threat; if she’d thought for a second that Dimitri was anything like the kind of men she’d known back in Enbarr, she would have avoided him at all costs, up to and including inventing a spell of invisibility to hide herself from his sight.

And she thought…

She thought she knew where this had been born, too.

The massacre of the Kingdom’s royal family, when it happened, had been all the gossips of Enbarr could talk about for weeks. Dorothea couldn’t have stayed ignorant of it if she’d tried—and the more details floated bloodily to her ears, the more she wished she could erase all knowledge of it from her mind. Ghoulish to say that something like that was prime gossip fodder, to be picked apart and dissected so thoroughly that it’d no longer be recognizable as the thing it once was by the time the gossips were through with it, but that was just how Enbarr’s gossip circuit _worked_.

But you don’t have to have gone through something like that yourself to understand what it could do to someone else, did you?

So wariness warred with concern, and so far, the war was locked in a stalemate. The lines had been drawn, but neither side could advance. Who knew who the victor would be? Certainly not Dorothea.

The reception hall was empty, and utterly dark. If not for the faint glimmers of light that stuck to the windows, Dorothea wouldn’t have even been able to tell where all the tables were.

She shivered as she looked around, trying to convince herself that the shadows did not move, or that if they did, it was only the wind outside that was to blame. The storm had risen to a roaring crescendo, beating against the walls so viciously that Dorothea half-expected to see those walls splinter, kept waiting for the floors to show themselves awash with water and deadfall and stolen light.

All the furious wind in the world couldn’t mask how jarringly empty the hall was. If not for the new curfew, it would never have been so empty at this time of night, even during such foul weather; there would have been a few students waiting out the storm before heading back to their rooms, at least. The way it was now, dark and silent, tables empty, the reception hall reminded Dorothea sharply of the necropolis in Enbarr. That had been somewhere to sneak into to get out of the rain as well, and oh, no matter how many people were in the necropolis, no one would ever have dared break the silence. Some things were not sacrosanct, and yet utterly inviolable.

“The dining hall?”

Dimitri’s voice sounded so suddenly, and there was a moment when Dorothea was ready to turn on him with eyes wide with something not quite fear, not quite dread, hissing at him to be _quiet_. But lightning flashed, the reception hall was bathed in ghostly light, and the illusion was broken.

She shook her head, and wondered if he could sense her disquiet. “The classrooms are closer to the dormitories.”

If she had a choice, she would have done as so many others had done in the past, and just camped out here until the storm had let up a bit. But before her was her dry room, dry clothes, warm bed, and at her back was the uncertainty of a dark night, and the uncertainty of a fast-approaching curfew with no clearly-explained punishment for breaking it.

“Right you are,” Dimitri muttered. He eyed the side door that led out into the green dubiously. His shoulders thrummed with nervous energy. “Let’s go.”

The last stretch to the dormitories was so windy that Dorothea’s umbrella was basically useless by the time they’d gotten past the classrooms. It blew inside-out just a few feet past them, Dimitri fighting to keep it from being ripped away by the wind’s grabbing hands. Dorothea’s shawl was soaked, a leaden weight that kept dragging her shoulders down. On the plus side, her hair was plastered to her face and shoulders now, so it wasn’t like it was flying into her mouth anymore.

Waves of water kicked up by the wind lapped against their legs as, at last, they made it to the shelter of the awning. The stairs up to the second floor were slick, gleaming darkly. Down the row of first-floor rooms, little puddles of white and golden light seeped out from under the doors. They gave off no warmth.

“Thank you for this,” Dimitri said, holding the inside-out umbrella out to her handle-first, like passing a sword. The roaring wind obliterated any inflection from his voice.

Mercedes had told Dorothea what he did to needles; she certainly wasn’t going to complain about his not accidentally breaking her umbrella in an attempt to right it. She shrugged ruefully. “It didn’t do us much good.”

“Still, thank you.”

Dry clothes and warm bed beckoned to her so sweetly, and yet Dorothea found herself asking, “Can I ask you something?”

Inflection was obliterated, but the stamp of wariness was still obvious when it cut into Dimitri’s face. “That depends upon the question.”

“I’m not looking for your life story, Dimitri,” Dorothea retorted, eyeing him closely. Was his neck usually that stiff? “I just want to ask you something.”

His shoulders sagged slightly, or perhaps the wind was working at him more than was immediately obvious, and that was a shiver. “Ask away, then—though I cannot guarantee I’ll know the answer.”

“I think you’ll know. You and Professor Melusine have been teaching some of the orphans living here to fight, haven’t you? How long have you been doing that?”

Wariness abated a little bit, but only enough to now be called ‘caution,’ instead. “Around three months, now.”

Dorothea nodded crisply. “Okay, three months.” That crispness fell away, and she was left with the softness of dead leaves rotting into the earth. “Why?”

He blinked. She had been speaking too quietly; he hadn’t heard her. Oh, Dorothea was an _opera singer_—she ought to have remembered to throw her voice if she wanted it to soar past any obstacles of distance or noise.

Or maybe she hadn’t been, because Dimitri faltered, his face folding in on itself like crumpled paper. “They… wished it. And I felt it necessary.” His voice was like a mumble, but the syllables kept bouncing up and down between loud and normal volumes, rather than the barely audible. He was nearly grown, but oh, he sounded like a child, and it made Dorothea think about absence, and the way its weight could drag you down. “They will need to be able to defend themselves when strife comes again.”

Oh, great, another person who thought conflict was so inevitable that he wouldn’t even consider the possibility that it might not be. _But then_, Dorothea thought, her stomach twisting bitterly, _I think I may have turned into someone like that, too_.

She’d been killing for the church for months, now. She could still feel the blood under her fingernails for hours after washing it off. She could feel the blood even when she hadn’t been close enough to the people she killed to have so much as a speck of their blood on her. Part of her wanted to stay here, where she’d made friends, where she felt—

There was a part of her that wanted to stay here. But if she stayed here, she’d have to go on killing in the name of the church, and she couldn’t abide that.

Yet, it had become almost normal to her, now. She wasn’t sure she liked that.

“Dorothea…” Her voice had gone soft with the rot of autumn deadfall, and now his voice was soft with something similar. Something bloody, perhaps. “I answered your questions. Now, will you answer mine?”

She looked his face up and down. She could still see that whatever it was lurking behind that mask of polite curiosity. Behind the dead still of the mask, it roiled and writhed incessantly. “Within reason,” she said.

Dimitri nodded seriously. (He was always so serious; Dorothea had to wonder what it would take for him to relax.) “I just wanted to know something. You and Mercedes have been teaching those same children needlework.” He sighed, rolling his shoulders. “I asked Mercedes her reason for it, and she said that it was nothing more than something she felt would be a good use of her time.” A huff of a laugh escaped his lips. “Truth be told, I think she may have been evading the question. But I don’t know why you agreed to help her. Why do that?”

_Because I would have wanted someone to do it for me. I _did _want someone to do it for me_.

Dorothea shrugged, and trusted in her training enough to believe that she’d convincingly made the gesture seem disinterested. “Nobody else was doing it,” she pointed out. “There aren’t a whole lot of people around here who care what they do, so long as they do their work, but a lot of them aren’t going to want to stay here forever.” Her voice hardened. “And not all of them are going to want to spend their lives fighting—or are even going to be able to. They need to be able to do other things if they’re going to survive.”

How much could she do? She was going to be gone once the year was up, and when she was gone, they’d still be here, stuck laboring away all day while no one taught them the skills they’d need to survive in any other setting but this one. This was… This was utterly paltry, but it was something she could do. (She wished she could find something more. She felt as if she was trying to scale a sheer wall with nothing more than her hands.)

It was an answer, but it wasn’t one that seemed to satisfy Dimitri. She could see him gritting his teeth behind a closed mouth as he brought up a hand to rub reflexively over the knuckles on the other. (Dorothea tried to remember if she’d ever seen him out and about without those gauntlets on, and she didn’t think she had.) “Even if they don’t wish to fight, battle will find them, sooner or later.” She honestly couldn’t tell if he was speaking to her, or just to himself. “This world is not kind enough to spare them.”

“And yet…” Dorothea sighed heavily. “And yet, it’s still something we can hope for, isn’t it?” All her energy fled her at once, and she just felt… She felt very tired. And she didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “Good night, Dimitri,” she said, and turned on her heel without another word.

Something that might have been “Good night, Dorothea,” was chewed to pieces by the roaring of the wind.

-0-0-0-

By the time Dorothea figured out just what it was that had been so off about Dimitri, she’d let down her guard enough that to see all the chains fly off and the darkness go about unleashed sent her flinching away as if burned. Not even directed at her, not even fully unexpected, and still, she shied away from it. That was how she’d stayed alive so long, after all. When those around you show you the worst of themselves and bare their gory fangs, you trust that this is the truth, and you do _not _lay yourself down in their jaws. That was how she’d stayed alive this long.

(_Was there nothing I could do?_)

-0-0-0-

War gripped Fódlan as a sudden fever that would not quit, sickening all it touched as it spread its burned and bony fingers across the land. Once it was there, it felt as if it had been inevitable, and Dorothea cursed herself for not realizing as much herself beforehand. Funny, how you could only see the cracks that had been growing for years when they widened into fissures into which all else threatened to fall. Funny how easily you could miss something like that, until it was happening right in front of you.

Dorothea had seen the resolve in Edie’s eyes. It was an expression fit more for the slums of Enbarr than the polished, gleaming royal court, and there were times when Dorothea wondered if anyone else could truly see it for what it was. There were many who claimed they couldn’t understand where their emperor’s sheer determination came from, but Dorothea knew that look like she knew her own body: it was the resolve of a woman who felt there was no way forward but this way, who felt that all other paths would lead her nowhere but the abyss. Keep moving forward—if ever I look back, I will lose it all.

Dorothea had been there, herself. It was a feeling that was hard to put into words; the best way to describe it was the narrow, biting knife’s edge between fury and despair. It’s hard to keep your balance, when you’re standing on the edge of a knife. It’s much easier to slip in your own blood, and tumble down, down, down into the abyss.

(_Is there nothing I can do?_)

But Edie didn’t seem to feel the knife slicing through the soles of her boots—or if she did, she was so determinedly looking forward that she just couldn’t bring herself to look down. And her heart was closed now, a book shut and locked, sealed away from all prying eyes.

_I would have helped, if I could. I would have listened, if she’d spoken. I would have held her hand, if she’d asked._

_Was there nothing I could do?_

Edie made no protest when Dorothea returned to the opera. One of the first things Edie had done on returning to Enbarr was release Petra from the terms of Brigid’s surrender to the Empire, and she made no protest when Petra chose to return home to her family. She said nothing when Lin and Bern returned to their homes. When Caspar headed off to goddess knows where, to do goddess knows what, Edie made no attempt to stop him. And when Ferdie raged at her for imprisoning his (horribly corrupt, horribly unsavory, and accused of so many awful things that even Dorothea, removed as she was from the court, could see how much more mercy Duke Aegir had been given than he truly deserved) father, when he stormed out of Enbarr, collected the remnants of his father’s men, and all but openly declared his intention to defect from the Empire, Edie let him go.

She wasn’t completely alone, still had Hubert (it was a little strange calling him by his nickname when he was now laboring under such a cumbersome title as Minister of the Imperial Household), and if there was anything Dorothea could be glad of in such a world as this one, Dorothea could be glad of that. Everyone needed someone they could trust, and for Edie, that list was rapidly shrinking. She would have been someone else for Edie to lean on if she could have borne it, but the only way that could have happened was if she’d entered the war, and—

The offer stood open. No one was forcing her to choose one way or the other, least of all Edie. She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. She couldn’t bear it.

War consumed the north of Fódlan. The whispers of what had happened in Fhirdiad trickled down to Enbarr, and for the first time in a very long time, Dorothea found herself wishing she could remember the prayers one was supposed to say for the souls of the departed. Piety had never been written on her bones as it had been on others—Manuela had been a fervent churchgoer during their shared time here, but all of her encouragement couldn’t persuade Dorothea to join her at any of the services—and she didn’t know those prayers by heart. There was one to help ensure a departed soul found the peace necessary to enter the next world, but Dorothea couldn’t remember the words, not in full, just the well-trodden verse: _save us all from sin_. And if there was a goddess anywhere around, a real person instead of a concept people liked to throw around as an expletive, Dorothea doubted she would hear her prayers. Not _hers_.

_He’s just the type of person to become a ghost. A very angry ghost_. _But I hope—_

War consumed the north of Fódlan. What was happening in Faerghus was _not _relegated to whispers, and it sounded as if all of the Holy Kingdom was going up in flames, even Sylvain’s old family lands, which had been charitably described as a frozen hell. From the stories Dorothea heard, it sounded as if Ailell was spilling all across that country, bringing the goddess’s wrath with it. She hoped her friends were safe. She hoped for so many things.

War would one day consume all of Fódlan, and there was no denying it. It was going to be at her doorstep one day, would come and sit down in her room with her, leering at her out of empty eye-sockets. It would beckon her forward with fleshless fingers, and Dorothea knew she’d have no choice but to follow it. But for now, she flinched away from it as one would flinch away from a lashing tongue of flame. She just couldn’t bear it.

So Dorothea returned to the opera, instead—it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go. Normally, they would never have accepted back someone who had previously abandoned the company, but Dorothea wasn’t an ordinary chorus girl, she’d been keeping up with her training in the time she’d been away, and if the stage crew were to be believed, the audience had missed her while she was gone, which—

She wasn’t sure she believed that at all. Other girls, other songstresses, just as pretty and talented as she, had left or been thrown away, and been forgotten by the audience in days. If that much. Even Manuela’s impression had stuck only for a few weeks after her departure, and if anyone had deserved immortal fame within the walls of this opera house, it was her. Dorothea was almost one-hundred percent certain they were just saying that to butter her up.

Still, she came back.

There was a new diva who had equal billing with Dorothea, a girl named Sanchia whose looks reminded Dorothea of Ingrid and whose manner put Dorothea in mind of Hilda, if Hilda had actually a work ethic. She was sixteen, pretty, sweet-voiced, and had so many stars in her eyes that starlight was all she could see. She had so many dreams of a life full of songs and fame, and when she told Dorothea these things, Dorothea smiled, nodded, and all she could think was: _You are very new here_.

Was this what Manuela had felt when Dorothea was starting out at the opera? It wasn’t as if Dorothea had _forgotten _all the dreams of her early adolescence; the thorn of mortification still pricked her heart. Manuela had left just a couple of years after Dorothea had joined Mittelfrank; surely she must have seen clearly what the future held for her, must surely have known it would only be a handful of years more before she was being pushed out the door. Manuela had never tried to warn Dorothea off of those dreams of hers, and now, Dorothea thought she might have some idea as to why.

It… Dorothea wasn’t sure how kind it would be to leave Sanchia to discover the truth on her own. But in Sanchia’s place, she knew, entirely too well, that if Manuela had ever tried to warn her, she just would _not _have listened. She would have thought that, oh, she was _different_, she would last where all the others had eventually been discarded for one reason or another. She would have ignored every well-meaning warning Manuela tried to give her, and perhaps she would have dug her heels in, never looked for an alternative, and let herself be blinded by starlight until the day her eyes were plucked out when she was cast aside.

_She’ll figure it out on her own, eventually. I just hope she doesn’t figure it out the way Irmhild or Sigrid did_. Dorothea shuddered, choking back bile at the thought of what had happened to Sigrid in particular. Over three years ago, that had been, now, and the impression it had left on her was one that she did not think would ever leave—she was just not fortunate enough to ever forget. _And I hope…_ She smiled sadly into her reflection in the mirror in her old—current, now—dressing room. The scratches in the glass distorted her reflection just as she remembered. _…I hope it doesn’t change her too much, when she figures it out._

Dorothea settled back into life at the opera, and it was like she’d never left at all. Like slipping on an old cloak, one stuck through with needles, a moth-eaten old cloak that had been perfumed with rosewater to mask the sweet rot of mildew. But Dorothea was a performer, and a stubborn one at that. Anyone who expected her to let on that she could smell the rot was an idiot, and she would never let her face falter when beads of blood bubbled up in her skin.

But oh, it was so much harder now to sup on false love and pretend it was anything but the sweet poison that it was. Suitors came knocking at her door, suitors came bearing gifts, and Dorothea wasn’t young or foolish enough to fool herself into thinking that what they wanted was any more real than her performance on the stage, or any more lasting than the dew that glittered on her dingy window in the mornings. They gave her false love to feast on, but what had been growing bitter even before she had left the first time was now more akin to vitriol than anything else. Every time she tipped it down her throat, she was surprised it hadn’t rendered her mute.

(She’d tasted the real thing, now, and how could anyone expect her to be content with this again?)

-0-0-0-

Dorothea went out into the city more often than she had when first she was with the opera company. When she’d been a girl, her days and nights were swallowed whole with training her voice, practicing dance steps, studying and studying and studying in preparation for the brutal entrance exams to the Officers Academy. Dorothea Arnault had been a girl with little free time on her hands.

Now, Dorothea Arnault was a woman with somewhat more free time on her hands, and when she looked upon Enbarr with such eyes as she had now, it was a different city entirely from the one she had known as a child.

“There’s a new sweet shop open on Greenmarket Lane,” Sanchia told her.

A strong gust of chilly wind, winter clinging to spring’s coattails still, blustered down the street, carrying with it the reek of garbage and rotting meat, though Dorothea knew the smell would have been far worse in summer. At least in spring-trying-to-escape-from-winter, it didn’t turn her stomach quite as badly. Dorothea wrinkled her nose and gritted her teeth. She’d gotten so used to clean air when she was living in the monastery; what had been unpleasant before was _foul _now.

Sanchia either didn’t notice the smell, or was better at Dorothea at not letting it affect her, for her only reaction to the wind was to clench her hands on the broad brim of her rose-red, felt hat. “Have you been to that sweet shop yet, Dorothea?” she asked.

“Hmm, no.” Dorothea rolled her shoulders, trying to get her shawl more securely pulled across them. “It must be very new; I don’t remember hearing about it when I was living here before I went to the Officers Academy.”

Sanchia’s bright green eyes lit up (Dorothea twisted the little goddess ring on her left ring finger, and prayed Sanchia couldn’t detect any sign of the pang that harshly struck her heart), and she pointed down the street, in the general direction of Greenmarket Lane. “Do you want to go? Their marzipan is wonderful, and they’ve been selling gingerbread for the past month, as well.”

“Why not?” Dorothea agreed, smiling mildly. “It’ll be nice to see what they have.” It would be nice for something novel, something that could pose a distraction to the thoughts that kept racing through her mind.

They made their way towards Greenmarket Lane, Sanchia leading the way. It wasn’t a quick walk, or a straight path—Sanchia kept stopping to eye hats or dresses on dressmaker’s dummies set out in display windows, or the other items that would be set out with the intention of catching a passerby’s eye. Dorothea didn’t know much about Sanchia’s past—Sanchia hadn’t volunteered the information, and Dorothea kept trying to find a way to ask that wouldn’t run the risk of cutting open scar tissue that ought to be left alone, and never did manage to find it—didn’t know if she was from Enbarr originally, and what sort of life she’d led before coming to Mittelfrank.

These stops could be born from simple curiosity. They could be born from wistfulness. They could be born from the temptation of ‘Oh, I have _money_, now; how best to spend it?’ Dorothea didn’t know Sanchia well enough to even _try _to make a guess at what was fueling them, but whatever the reason behind them, Sanchia’s stops were giving Dorothea more than enough time to become disoriented by everything about her surroundings.

It was astonishing how different a place could seem, depending on what sort of place in society you occupied when you were in it. Dorothea really hadn’t been out and about much in Enbarr when she had been an opera singer, before she’d gone to the Officers Academy.

There was so much of Enbarr Dorothea just couldn’t see as a slum-dweller. No ordinance existed barring the destitute from the wealthier districts, but there were always plenty of household guards stationed at the outer walls of the estates and mansions and palaces of noble neighborhoods, ready to eject the riff-raff at their master’s command. Those places had been as a completely different world from the one Dorothea had inhabited; the boundaries were invisible, and as easily surmounted as the Oghma Mountains or the encircling seas.

What Dorothea had known of Enbarr was the view from the alleys, a world that had seemed so brilliant and effervescent from a dark and narrow place full of trash and other detritus. She had known the shantytowns, known little shacks missing their roofs or otherwise one of their walls, known muddy paths and crowded wells. She had known the necropolis, raised tombs and crypts and mausoleums both gleaming and weather-stained, the city of the dead where you’d find more of the living than you’d expect, and all the silence you would expect from a city of the dead—the living were only visitors, and must abide by the rules of the house they were visiting.

What Dorothea had known of Enbarr was the disheveled, the decrepit, the dead. What glimpses she had had of Enbarr on the other side of the border had seemed a glittering paradise, and she had coveted it body and soul.

(Wanting is better than having.)

Enbarr as seen from the eyes of a songstress was, just as Dorothea had anticipated, a different world entirely. Exactly what those differences would turn out to be, that, she had not anticipated.

Once upon a time, Dorothea had been a girl with starlight in her eyes. She had thought that starlight had first blinded her when she entered the opera, but standing in Enbarr in the pallid light of a dreary day in early spring, she could see that the starlight had distorted her vision for years before that.

There was nothing special about the colors of this world she now inhabited. She had jumped the borders at the mouths of the alleyways, and saw with clear eyes that what had seemed an explosion of color when she watched from the shadows only seemed as such before because the world she had lived in then was so dull. Yes, the colors of the well-to-do’s clothing were rich; yes, the flowers in the front windows of the flower shops were lovely and vibrant; yes, the paint on the shop signs was vivid and eye-catching. But there was nothing special about them. Dorothea could no longer see what she had thought so magical about the streets she walked freely as a songstress. They were just… streets. Their normalcy was so grounded and solid that the kaleidoscopes of color from Dorothea’s childhood could only have been phantasms, waking dreams born of stardust and opium fumes.

Enbarr became a different city entirely when its people interacted with Dorothea the songstress, rather than Dorothea the urchin—here was where these streets and lanes and shops became utterly unrecognizable.

This was the street where she had once been kicked by a nobleman who couldn’t be bothered to ask, or even tell, an urchin child to get out of his way. Dorothea couldn’t have mistaken the location if she’d tried; the cobblestones on the streets were just the same hexagonal shape and dun color and rough texture as the ones of the gutter she’d landed in, the gutter where now a trio of rock doves fluffed their feathers as they bathed. His shoe had been adorned with blue glass beads that flashed like stars in the sunlight as his foot lashed out; the bruise that bloomed on Dorothea’s side had been littered with tiny pockmarks that formed the shape of a crescent moon. But judging by the way these passersby on the street looked at her now, no one recognized her as the urchin child who had once been kicked into a gutter by a passing nobleman. No one seemed to guess that she had ever been in a position to be kicked out of the way without so much as a “Would you please move aside?”

The shopkeepers who had eyed her warily or simply refused her entry into their shops now looked on hopefully as she passed them by. The sort of men who would have leered at her when she was eleven, or else tried something that went beyond leering, now took one look at her fine clothes and deemed her the sort of woman who likely had servants whom she could sent after men who leered or went beyond leering. And those who lingered in the alleyways, thin and ragged, shied away from her gaze, as if they also feared violence.

(There were some people who didn’t even look at her at all. When Dorothea had been an urchin child who occasionally needed to step out onto the streets deemed worthy only of the great and the good to get somewhere, all eyes had snapped onto her immediately when she exposed herself to the sun or the lamps. Reflected in their eyes, she had seen a dirty, scrawny figure of a girl, unloved and unloving, something that resisted the urge to return to the earth only out of defiance of every stuck-up lord and lady who sneered at her and tried to make a rat or a cockroach out of a human girl.

Later, when Dorothea sang on the stage, all eyes would snap onto her form yet again. The first time, she had faltered, nearly fled, and kept herself rooted to the wooden planks beneath her feet only by means of the same defiance that kept her from returning to the earth. It had only been after the applause broke out as constant rolls of manmade thunder that Dorothea had realized that what was in their eyes was not scorn, but adulation.

She had spent all her life being watched. She had spent all her life with the _awareness_ that she was being watched—her trainers in the opera had been so surprised at how quickly Dorothea picked up acting, but if ever they had thought about it, she didn’t think they would have been surprised at all. She’d been primed for acting her whole life.

All her life, Dorothea had been looked at. She had no idea how freeing it could be to walk down a street and realize that there were people around her who weren’t looking at her at all.)

They all regarded her so differently, and the effect it had was to keep Dorothea from finding anything resembling an even keel. There was no reconciling the differences in how she was treated without turning her attention to the sheer fickleness of nearly everyone around her, and it wasn’t as if _that _provided Dorothea with any more of a sense of stability. What was worse was that _no _one else seemed to feel the ground wobbling the way she could. The people of this city had changed, changed violently, and none of them seemed to understand.

They had changed, just as the world had changed.

There came the strident, brassy call of a trumpet, and Dorothea knew instantly what it meant. She and Sanchia backed up on the sidewalk, as far away from the street as they could manage, while the carts and carriages that had been traversing the street hastily drew as far to the side as they could and stopped there.

Another bright call from the trumpet. The wind picked up, whistling in tune to the trumpeter. Dorothea’s hairpins raked against her scalp; searing points of pain erupted on her skin like the sparks shot up by a weak thunder spell. At her back, the cold of the clammy window slowly seeped past her coat, and at her front, the wind picked at her face with icy, unkind fingers. Sanchia put a hand on her shoulder and craned her neck, standing on tiptoe to get a better look over the heads of the other people who’d stopped to watch.

They’d both seen this before. They’d both see this again. The hair-raising spectacle of it never faded.

Whenever she saw this, Dorothea wondered what sort of training soldiers had to undergo to be able to walk in time as neatly and evenly as Edie’s soldiers could manage. Dorothea was no stranger to choreography, no stranger to the sort of training required for groups of performers to dance in time without knocking into each other (unless the script demanded it, of course), but this was always something on so much larger a scale than she had ever experienced in the opera. The stage could fit fifty people on it at one time, and _that _made for a crowded stage, indeed. No one would have ever tried to fit hundreds of people on that stage at one time, not if they wanted it to still be standing after they were done.

And yet, what came marching down the street in neat, tight-packed columns, was hundreds of men and women making their way towards the Eagle Gate at the far eastern edge of the city. They had been well-trained for this, too, for when they encountered carts or carriages parked on the side of the road, they didn’t so much as skip a beat when altering the order of their movement to make their way around them. The outmost columns would stop, let five each of the inner column make their way by, then five of the outer columns would step by, and so on, and so forth. Their uniforms were the rusty color of dried blood, their lance heads gleamed like ice, and their faces were all so similarly resolute and set that Dorothea sometimes entertained thoughts of them all being related, regardless of how ridiculous those thoughts were.

“There’s always so many,” Sanchia remarked to her in a near-whisper that was nonetheless clearly audible to Dorothea’s ears, over the low rumble of hundreds of marching feet.

“They come from all over the Empire.” Edie never had any trouble attracting new soldiers. Isolated she might have been, but she could still inspire loyalty with the best of them. “I mean, when you’re trying to fight a war on two fronts—three, if we’re being honest—you’ve got to get as many men as you can find, right?”

If the marching feet of the soldiers had been as thunder upon the earth, the deep, rhythmic tattoo that beat now upon the cobblestones was as an earthquake, a tremor rocketing up from the foundations of the earth.

Dorothea had not been present for the first iteration of _this _part of the spectacle. She’d been rehearsing for a production of ‘Lady Misery’ and rarely was out and about before dark as a result. Though the news had quickly been hushed up—no small feat, considering the breadth and sheer _speed _of Enbarr’s gossip circuit; Dorothea thought she could see the faint outline of Hubert’s hand in it—word had gotten back to Dorothea before the gossip was quashed. She knew, more or less, what had transpired.

She wasn’t surprised that there had been an incident. Over the year Dorothea had spent in Garreg Mach, she’d had enough encounters with hawks, wolves, and demonic beasts to know that the sound of screaming agitated them. No, more accurate to say that the sound of screaming is to demonic beasts what a lover’s call is to a hopeful admirer: something to lure you in, something to set your appetite ablaze. Other people whispered of the state of the bodies, faces waxen masks of disgust and horror, but Dorothea wasn’t surprised at all. What else were they expecting, for the beasts simply not to react? The only way they wouldn’t have reacted would be if they had been dead or otherwise rendered insensate, and in that case, the armies would have had a hell of a time getting them out of the city. Dorothea couldn’t imagine what sort of vehicle would be needed to shift a demonic beast’s massive bulk, especially not _quickly_.

She wasn’t surprised. Edie hardly made a secret of the fact that the Empire was making use of demonic beasts to help human soldiers win the battles they fought. She was trying to stamp out the Church of Seiros and absorb the Kingdom and Alliance into the Empire as quickly as she could, and if you were really dead-set on achieving your goals as quickly as possible, by any means which you had at your disposal, something like this wasn’t as surprising as it might be to someone who didn’t understand that Edie _was _determined to achieve her goals as quickly as possible, by any means she had at her disposal.

She wasn’t surprised. After the first… _incident_, someone, maybe Edie, maybe Hubert, maybe Count Bergliez, had ensured that notices would always be distributed before fresh troops were sent out of the city towards the front lines, and _especially_ if those troops happened to be accompanied by any, ahem, unorthodox allies. Those notices also included information on how to behave if you happened to be on the street or the sidewalk as a demonic beast was marched down it, and a friendly reminder of the fine that would be extracted if you broke the new ordinance prohibiting unseemly levels of noise while military forces traveled anywhere within two hundred feet of your current location.

She wasn’t surprised, and yet, the world still shifted on its axis every time Dorothea found herself out on the sidewalk when a spectacle such as this one took place.

Just one demonic beast, this time, flanked by mages wearing plague doctors’ masks. The mages were just as silent as the soldiers, but they did not march in time with the same practiced professionalism as the soldiers who had preceded them. They just walked, some with noticeable slouches or limps, and though their faces were completely hidden, Dorothea had the sense that they were watching their audience just as warily as they watched the demonic beast lumbering within the confines of its moving cage of flesh. Not surprising; demonic beasts were rarely picky about the flesh they rent when they were whipped up into a frenzy.

Dorothea’s eyes were fixed on the beast as it slowly, so slowly, passed her by. The beasts that emerged from the heart of Enbarr, moving east, west, north, and sometimes, very rarely, south, bore little resemblance to the demonic beasts that had haunted the wilds around Garreg Mach. Those beasts had been white and scaly and reptilian in appearance, like the lizards that sunned on the cast iron railings and fired clay roofs of Enbarr, but much, much bigger. These things that Dorothea had watched lumber out of Enbarr were entirely different. Their bodies were dark and sinewy, and their mask-like faces were almost… They almost looked like…

No one quite knew where these things had come from. It was a question whose answer seemed always to fall by the wayside somewhere along the way to its destination. Whenever Dorothea would watch them pass her by on the street, that question surged to the forefront of her mind, and oh, this was not solid ground she stood on, was it?

“Dorothea?” Sanchia’s voice sounded very close to her ear, her breath hot on Dorothea’s skin. She could have spoken far more loudly and not risked violating that ordinance, but she seemed to have chosen caution, on this occasion. “You knew the emperor when the two of you were attending the Officers Academy, didn’t you?”

Firm cobblestones lined the earth beneath her feet. The earth beneath those cobblestones did not feel nearly so firm.

“Ah, yes, I did.”

That earth seemed to sink and squelch under her feet.

Voice hushed with something close to awe, Sanchia asked, “What is she _like_?”

Something oozed up from between the cracks in the cobblestones. Dorothea could feel something warm and wet and viscous seeping through the cloth of her shoes. “She’s hard to put into words,” and Dorothea trusted the wind to mask the weakness of her voice.

-0-0-0-

One day in summer, nearly two and a half years after Dorothea returned to Enbarr, she came before those in the opera house whom she cared about, and said to them: “I’m leaving.”

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected in the way of reactions. She hadn’t really been thinking about reactions when she made the decision. She just…

Who, if they knew what was in her heart, could possibly expect her to _stay_?

“You didn’t…” Sanchia stumbled over her words as Dorothea packed what of her things she’d chosen to take with her—was trying to decide whether she _should _take with her—into her old, cracked leather bag. “…I mean, you didn’t seem like what everyone said you were like before you left the first time, but…” She wrung her hands, to keep them from fretting at her beaded skirt. “You’re _leaving_? You’re leaving _again?”_

Dorothea shrugged. She eyed her clothes, trying to decide how many changes of them she should pack. She had long ago mastered the delicate art of maximizing the amount of things she could pack away into one bag or case. The question of taking most of her knick-knacks with her, or stuff like her tea set, could only be answered with a resounding ‘no’, but she hoped, really hoped, that if someone happened to rob her while she was on the road and carry off her bag, they were at least astounded by how many clothes she’d managed to fit into just one bag. Dorothea did aim always to impress.

And which clothes to pack, too? Odds were good she wasn’t going to be find any well-appointed inn to stay in over the winter; she was going to want something _warm_. (And awareness was biting Dorothea’s skin like the phantom teeth of winter, that what was warm enough for an Enbarr winter was woefully insufficient for winter virtually _anywhere _north of Enbarr.) But oh, she didn’t want to leave her nicer dresses behind, either.

_I am vain. I am miserably vain. _And she did not want to discard the feeling that came from wearing pretty dresses made from fine materials, and she wanted even less the knowledge that crashed through her mind now: if she ever came back for them, she’d either find that someone had sold them while she was gone, or she’d find them otherwise missing and _no one _willing to explain what had happened to them while she was gone.

_I will have to go on being miserably vain. Somehow, I think the goddess will take greater exception to faults other than this one—if she even cares enough to take exception to anything at all. _Even as far from the front as Enbarr was, stories of what went on in the active warzones to the north weren’t exactly difficult to come by. _Times like these, I’m not sure that she cares about anything or anyone._

She’d be sure not to say something like that to Mercedes, or Flayn. If she ever saw either of them again, she’d make sure not to say something like that to their faces. She tried not to be cruel. She really did.

The question of just what she was going to pack into her bag was one that would have to be answered later. Dorothea turned to Sanchia, wearing a smile that she hoped was gentle enough to hide the knife’s edge trying to cut her lips into a jagged line. “I’m leaving again,” she said, simply. “This hasn’t been working out.”

“But _why_?” Sanchia spluttered, and she was a performer, just as much as Dorothea, but Dorothea didn’t think that the way her face contorted now was any kind of performance. Even at their most raw, when they put on that kind of face as a performance, there was still some kind of allure to it. Even when the character they played was in perfect agony, their suffering still had to be pretty. This wasn’t pretty. This concoction of confusion and hurt and something that Dorothea didn't want to believe was abandonment combined to form a truly _ugly _mask.

Dorothea looked to her. She smiled, and rested her hands gently on Sanchia’s sagging shoulders. “I know you don’t understand.” Tilting her head didn’t make the mask of emotions plastered on Sanchia’s face any less ugly, but it was an endearing sort of ugliness. It was not the sort of thing you saw very often in a sphere where everyone around modulated all of their reactions as carefully as they did. It was a pity more people didn’t appreciate this sort of thing more than they did; Dorothea thought the stage could benefit from seeing what honest ugliness looked like. “And I am not going to tell you.” She took a deep, shuddering sigh. “You might understand some day, but I hope you don’t.”

After all, who knew what the future could bring? Not someone who was stepping over the borders of the world that contained everything she had ever known, yet again.

At the very least, though, Dorothea was going to make sure that the future didn’t bring her the wrath of any creditors. It wasn’t like she often borrowed much of _anything _(didn’t want to get caught in webs of debts and obligations, didn’t want to incur _interest_), but now, she was leaving, and now was the time to ensure that anything she had borrowed was returned. A necklace to one of the choir girls, a gauzy silk scarf to one of the tenors, a pen to one of the junior managers. And to Everard…

“Move a bit,” Everard told her, as Dorothea came to stand close by him. “Can’t see a damned thing with you blocking the light like that.”

“You can’t see a whole lot to start with, Everard.”

He let out a barking laugh. “I can see enough, girl. Just need a bit more light than most to do my work.”

He’d always been like that. For all the time Dorothea had known him, he’d been at least somewhat near-sighted—and the cataract that had started to glaze his left eye these past few months didn’t help. Other things, however, had changed.

“Heard you’re leaving,” he said in a voice that was half-conversational, half-grunting, as he struggled to knot the rope holding together two planks of wood they often used as props in productions. When Dorothea had just been starting out here, his hands had still been steady, but the more time wore on and the older they both got, the more trouble Everard seemed to have with this sort of thing. The hands that had once been so deft and clever were now stiff and gnarled, taking on a craggy, almost claw-like appearance. He could still perform more delicate tasks, sure—he’d have been kicked to the curb a long time ago if he couldn’t—but it took him more time, now. “So where are you heading?”

“North,” and just making that sort of admission felt dangerous enough that Dorothea did it only with her voice half-hushed. “I was hoping to leave while the weather was good, so spring didn’t seem like a good time.”

Everard shook his gray head and clicked his tongue. “Smart girl. Don’t know if you’ve heard the stories, but last winter was rough, up there; you’d probably find the roads north of Gronder all snowed out.” He looked at her for the first time, squinting up at her with searching brown eyes. “Don’t suppose you’re ever gonna tell anyone _why _you’re leaving?”

Dorothea laughed hollowly. “What’s life without a few secrets?”

“A lot less of a hassle, let me tell you.”

Dorothea took her silver brooch from the pocket of her dress, and held it out to him. “I…” The metal was warm from its time so close to her skin; her fingers clenched around it. Reluctance washed over her like the ocean had come to call, but she had to make a clean break. Had to.

Everard regarded the brooch, but he didn’t quite seem to understand what this was about. “The clasp still holding? I told you, you ought to take it to a jeweler if you really want a repair that’s going to _last_. What’s good doesn’t always come _free_, girl.”

Oh, she knew that. That was not a lesson Dorothea had ever needed to be taught. She shook her head, almost hesitantly. “You… You know I’m leaving. When I went to the Officers Academy, I forgot to give this back to you. But now, I don’t know if I’m coming back at all. Even if this upcoming winter isn’t as hard as the last one, this is wartime; anything can happen. So, you should take this back.”

Another laugh rang out in the still air of the backroom they currently occupied, but this one was strained with incredulity. “That a joke, girl?”

“No joke. I don’t know if I’ll ever return here. You gave this to me such a long time ago—“ she glanced down at the brooch, at the shattered pieces of her reflection in its surface “—and it’s real silver, too; I can’t imagine how much it must have _cost_.”

Everard rolled his eyes. “I took two of my spoons and had a blacksmith melt them down; it wasn’t _that _expensive.”

Dorothea frowned down at him, throat thrumming with something like a scream. “Still. Everard, just take it.”

“_No, _Dorothea.” He rose to his feet, more quickly than Dorothea would have guessed from all the complaints he made about his aching, arthritic joints. Everard closed his hands around Dorothea’s, pressing the brooch tightly into her palms. His skin was rough as sandpaper upon hers, but his grip was a gentle one. “No, I am _not _going to take it back.”

“Why not?”

He tilted his head, peering pretty intently into her face for a man who was near-sighted in both eyes and nearly blind in one. “It was a gift, girl,” he said at last, voice cracking with something that might have been age, or might not have been age at all. “I remember what you were like when you came here.” He smiled, but no happiness entered his face. “You were scrawny and dirty and skittish as all hell.”

“Thanks,” Dorothea drawled.

“And I didn’t want to think about why it was you were so skittish—“ he sighed heavily “—though nowadays, I wish I’d asked more questions, back then. _Someone _should have. I saw you, a skittish, scrawny little kid, and it got obvious quick that you didn’t have anything nice to call your own. Everyone should have something nice they can call their own and, well, it was only two spoons.” Everard squeezed her hands. “It was a gift,” he murmured. “I didn’t lend it to you, or let you borrow it—I _gave _it to you, with no desire to ever have it given back.” Jaw clenched, he went on, “It’s not much, I know. I could have done more, I know. But it was something I could do.”

The words…

Dorothea couldn’t begin to describe the emotions that ignited in her chest to hear them.

Dorothea smiled thickly, grateful she’d chosen not to wear any makeup on this day of departure. “…Thank you, Everard.” She drew her hands slowly back, and slipped the brooch back into her pocket. “Now, I’m going to go do something, too.”

She took her bag, kissed the goddess ring that glittered on her hand, and stepped once again over the edge of everything she had known.

-0-0-0-

There was no question of whether or not it was safe to tell anyone who might offer her transport what her ultimate destination was; Dorothea wasn’t stupid enough to believe that that would end well. What had once been a hub for travel across the continent, a prime destination for merchants, pilgrims, and sight-seers alike, was now an empty ruin, a haven for rats and corpses and whatever ghosts would attach themselves to the walls of a holy place. It was an empty ruin, and had once been the seat of the archenemy of the Adrestian Empire. As far as that same Adrestian Empire was concerned, unless you were with the military or were otherwise acting on the orders of the Emperor, you had no legitimate cause to be heading to Garreg Mach.

And the further north Dorothea got in the Empire, the more difficult she found travel, in general. Oh, at first, it was easy enough to find a coach willing to take her twenty miles or so to the next town, easy enough to find a merchant’s caravan to hitch a ride with for a few days as they took her not _quite _in the direction she needed to be going in, but close enough that she wasn’t going to complain about it. But once she got to House Bergliez’s territory, things started getting a bit dicey.

It was there, somewhere southwest of Gronder Field, that the military checkpoints started to become more frequent, and the questions the guards asked of travelers regarding their destination and business became more probing, more difficult to evade or brush off. Not for nothing was Dorothea a performer, though, and she was able to last until she’d gotten as far as about the center of House Varley’s territory before she had to forsake the more well-trodden roads, and makes use of the backroads, the sunken lanes, and on some occasion what looked like the deer paths of Adrestia instead.

Northern Adrestia was beautiful this time of year; the poets who went on and on about the scenery hadn’t been lying, not even exaggerating. Dorothea had spent the vast majority of her life in a vast city, and even her year living in Garreg Mach had left her unprepared for how lush and verdant the wilds could be. Trees adorned with rich, glossy leaves canopied fields of bell-like pink foxgloves, and when the trees thinned, they gave way to fields of delicately-appointed, harshly-fragrant lavender. The rivers and streams Dorothea passed by were all remarkably clean and clear, to the point that if she hadn’t spent her whole life shying away from water that didn’t come from a well (and, in some cases, shying away even from water that _did _come from a well) she would likely have had no qualms about drinking from them. As the elevation heightened and the terrain became more severe, the views only became more stunning in their beauty.

Northern Adrestia was beautiful, this time of year. To someone who had spent the vast majority of her life living in a city, with relatively scant training on how to survive in the wilderness, northern Adrestia was not especially hospitable at _any _time of the year.

The part of Dorothea that wished she was traveling with someone who knew better than she how to live off of the land warred with the part of her that was grateful that there wasn’t anyone else around to see just how badly she was floundering. She had prided herself, for as long as she could remember, as being someone who understood how to survive on the streets of Enbarr. She had known all the best places to sleep during the winter nights, all the best places to go when it was raining (the parts of the necropolis the guards wouldn’t come within a mile of, the churches where the priests weren’t careful enough about locking up), which fountains she needed to visit and when for a quick, furtive bath, which food stall vendors weren’t attentive enough to realize that an apple or a meat bun was missing from their stock. If she had ever been ejected from the opera house as some of the other girls had been during her time there, she would have been able to survive on the streets again. Not happily, but she would have _survived_.

In the city, she would have survived, and not been hard-pressed to keep from returning to the earth. Out in the wilds, it was another matter entirely.

She’d not been completely stupid in how she’d gone about this. The first time Dorothea had passed through a village with foreknowledge that it was going to be at least a couple of days, on foot, before she reached another one, she’d stocked up on food. She’d barely been taught how to forage during her time at the Officers Academy, and Dorothea wasn’t certain how much of the knowledge she’d even managed to retain—she _knew _better than to rely on her own knowledge of the local flora and fungi to keep her from accidentally eating something poisonous.

She’d been sure to stock up on food, but then, the villages started getting further and fewer between, or started appearing on the horizon only to reveal themselves abandoned once Dorothea reached them, and there came a point where she had seriously misjudged how long it was going to take for her to get somewhere, and she had gone nearly a day without food before she finally found somewhere inhabited to get food from.

What food she bought (occasionally, someone would be willing to give her something without payment, but only occasionally) was becoming more expensive as well. Not a surprise; Dorothea had read enough books of military history both in preparation for and during her time at the Academy to know that wartime routinely brought about food shortages. Such wasn’t felt keenly in Enbarr, but then, Enbarr was the _capital_; Dorothea doubted any food shortages would make themselves apparent there unless the rest of the Empire was itself in a state of abject famine. Food was getting more expensive, and thus, Dorothea was starting to run low on money. She’d sold some of the jewelry she’d brought with her (and wept no tears to part with most of it; she’d brought it along for this very purpose), and was _thoroughly _certain she’d been paid less than what it was actually worth, but it kept her going a little longer without having to resort to selling some of the changes of clothes she’d brought with her.

And Dorothea had had a quick look at her money, a quick look at what jewelry she considered disposable remained in her possession, thought back on the way her expenses had been increasing as she traveled further and further north, and decided, at last, that she could no longer afford to stay the night in inns, on the occasion that she found any inns to stay in. Someone’s spare bedroom that they were willing to share for the night, yes. Someone’s barn, yes (Dorothea had slept in worse places; she didn’t care nearly as much about rats as others might have thought she would). A room in an inn, unfortunately not. Most nights, that meant roughing it. Out in the woods.

She remembered how to start a fire—and the lessons on fire _safety _had taken as well, so she remembered how to set up a campfire safely, and how to extinguish her fire come the morning. Dorothea was used to sleeping out in the open. Or, at least, she’d thought she’d been.

But it had been years since she’d last had to do that on a regular basis, and though the memories of sleeping in the necropolis or just sneaking up onto the flat roof of a commoner’s house on a mild night still cut sharply against the fabric of her mind, it would seem that her _body _had grown accustomed to sleeping on soft beds. Not, not just soft beds, though any bed would have felt soft compared to the hard-packed soil Dorothea started to encounter in the foothills of the Oghma Mountains. That was just it. She’d gotten used to sleeping in any bed at all.

Maybe that was why she found herself tonight, as she found herself on so many other nights sleeping outdoors, staying up long after the sun had hidden its face behind the western crags, huddled around the fire as the heat that had shimmered in the air during daylit hours vanished with the light.

She let out a gusty sigh. Though she might not have been willing to _drink _from the creeks and streams she came across, and fording them when necessary (bridges up here were either burned or wrecked or nonexistent) was getting to be a hardship, Dorothea was grateful to their _existence_—she would have been absolutely filthy by now, if not for them. (She had definitely gotten used to bathing on a regular basis, and it wasn’t something she was particularly keen to give up.) She’d stopped a bit early today when she came by a creek—no sense in letting this sort of opportunity go to waste, especially considering the sun shone bright and hot enough to dry her skin and hair relatively quickly—and she could at least have the comfort of going to sleep relatively clean. Not that she’d still be that clean once she awoke, but Dorothea knew what price must be paid for sleeping on the earth. There were steeper prices she could have paid for alternative arrangements. This was something she could live with.

Dorothea let out another sigh as she tipped herself down onto her back and stared up through the thinning canopy of leaves to look upon the stars. The night was clear as polished glass, and even past gently quivering leaves, she could make out the stars with no difficulty at all. She didn’t know their names, wouldn’t know the Blue Sea Star if it danced blue and glowing in front of her, but once upon a time, she had stared up at the stars every clear night that could be found in Enbarr. That had been a time in her life when there had been little beauty in _anything _around her. Even if it was something utterly beyond her reach, being able to glimpse beauty, even for a second, had been a balm to what squirmed under her skin.

(Maybe that was when Dorothea had decided things of beauty could only be indifferent. Those stars had left many different impressions on her, and some of them she was only starting to examine now, years after they had first made their mark upon her.)

She had set out to do… something. Life in Enbarr again was like being stuck under a bell jar, like being made into the pretty little doll that so many of her admirers in the audiences she had known had made of her. Eventually, she’d started running out of air under the tight-closed lips of the bell jar, and the only way to find it again was to throw off the cloche, and let it shatter all around her. And if Dorothea didn’t want the bell jar to regenerate, if she didn’t want the glass to piece itself back together and smother her again, she would have to leave. Just get out as quick as she could.

Dorothea had set out to do something, and she had never quite figured out what she was going to do when she set out. She’d assumed the knowledge would just come to her.

Now, she was hundreds of miles from Enbarr, and she still didn’t understand what it was she’d set out to do. She had no illusions as to her ability to stop this war single-handed. She didn’t particularly want to become a nun, even if this wasn’t a day and age when doing so anywhere south of the border with Leicester or Faerghus was like painting a bull’s-eye on your back. And… And Dorothea wasn’t in the mood to find someone to marry and settle down, not right now. Not while Fódlan was burning and not a single person could have put the fire out thought to do anything but fan the flames. Whether it was ethical or moral or _good _to bring children into a world such as the one she currently inhabited was very much an open question, but it was a choice Dorothea did not want to make, not now.

Dorothea rolled onto her side, warmed by the fire that licked its many glowing tongues on the dark sky, and wondered, wryly, if maybe the answer would come to her in a dream.

Probably not. That was the sort of thing that worked only in fairy tales, and this…

This was not a fairy tale, this world she lived in.

-0-0-0-

Sure enough, the answer didn’t come to Dorothea in a dream. Instead, it came one week later, as she was walking up a steep, winding mountain path, the wind blustering in her face with a chill that spoke of an overripe, rotting summer. There was a village some miles ahead—the little snake-trails of smoke winding in the air didn’t _look _like the smoke Dorothea had seen burning houses giving off as they collapsed into the earth—and maybe, just _maybe_, there’d be a barn where Dorothea could stay the night. Inns had been excised from the equation weeks ago. Now, after a few close encounters with some truly unsettling homeowners, Dorothea had soured on the idea of staying in people’s houses, as well. The nights had started getting chillier than Dorothea was entirely comfortable with, even with the blanket and cloak she slept under. She wouldn’t mind an opportunity for shelter.

Forests this remote were, Dorothea was learning, constantly alive with the sounds of birdcall, but she thought she could hear something else on the wind. Something that sounded almost…

“Dorothea!”

A pair of scrawny legs, skirt tangled around the skinned, knobbly knees, appeared in the air in front of her. Specifically, they were attached to a girl sitting on a tree branch, some six or seven feet above Dorothea. Dorothea barely had more than a moment to recognize the girl as Vilmantè, years older but still tiny and distinctly underfed-looking, before she launched herself out of the tree and landed heavily in Dorothea’s outstretched arms.

“I missed you,” was mumbled into her windswept, tangled hair. “We missed you; it’s been so cold and we’ve been so _hungry _and—“

Dorothea laughed and tightened her arms around Vilmantè’s back. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promised her.

It looked like she’d found what she needed to do.

-0-0-0-

Not that ‘what she needed to do’ was going to be easily accomplished.

It seemed that the orphans living around the monastery had taken to thieving to survive after the Church of Seiros abandoned this place, and those who’d survived the first winter—and there weren’t as many of those as there might have been if they had been homeless in Enbarr, instead—had become, as far as the still-inhabited villages within a twenty mile radius of the monastery were concerned, one of the _worst _recurring nuisances they were currently dealing with. Ranked third, behind adult bandits and the hawks and wolves the Knights of Seiros were no longer around to deal with during the lean months, were the orphans the church had abandoned here when they fled.

From what Dorothea understood, there had been no serious incidents—no stabbings or beatings or murders—and she was willing to grant that, at least, as a relief. But nevertheless, more than two years had this been going on, and it had unfortunately left a deep impression.

One that quickly spread to her, once she made it clear that she was taking into her charge any of the local orphans who were inclined to live under her care who cared to _be _under an adult’s care again. _Some _of the local villagers were grateful to her for trying to rein these kids in, but a lot more saw someone who was willing to associate with the kids who’d been pilfering from their larders and raiding their crops and just assumed that she was a thief like them—or that, if she wasn’t now, she would be soon. Maybe they weren’t so far off. Dorothea had been a thief, once, but then, most children who had been in her shoes at the age she’d been in them wound up turning to thievery at least a few times to keep from returning to the earth.

Bad reputation or no, there would be no more thieving now that she was here. She’d made that clear enough to Vilmantè, to Kadri and Ainārs and Mārīte and Valdis and the others who had come to her when she had made her presence here known, and while some of them had grumbled about it at first, none had put up too much resistance to the idea that they’d now obtaining their food by more legitimate means. That tracked with what Dorothea remembered of _her _childhood, as well. She hadn’t known too many kids forced to thievery by their circumstances who wouldn’t have given it up, if ever they’d been given a way out.

After a couple of days in limbo, Kadri led the group to an abandoned house about a mile from the first village Dorothea had started rounding up kids in, and… life went on. Not without its difficulties, of course. The house was in poor shape and needed repairs for the winter that would, sooner than anyone was particularly comfortable with, come crashing down on all of them. Again, Dorothea was left floundering, just like she’d been floundering when she’d had to decide between foraging for food she wasn’t sure would be fit to eat, or just going without until she reached the next village. The kids helped while she figured out what she needed to be doing—some of them knew what they were doing better than she ever could. Some of the older ones took to the repairs, while Dorothea did what else needed to be done.

Apologies were made—they were never going to get _anywhere _unless the air was cleared, and this was where it started. Most of the villagers were, well, not completely unmoved, but definitely _skeptical_. A few softened once they finally saw the children who’d been robbing their larders and their fields in the light of day, got a good look at their scrawny forms and ragged clothing, and that, that was a start.

Dorothea started the laborious process of trying to win over the villagers who’d been skeptical of any attempt at going straight on her wards’ parts. Apparently some of these same villagers thought there was something ‘false’ about her manner. One of them looked her up and down, leered, and asked how much she’d paid her clients when she was living ‘down south’, and… Well. Once the man’s relatively sympathetic sister had pulled Dorothea off of him, everyone else who’d borne witness to the exchange-that-quickly-stopped-involving-words had been gawping and evaluating her out of entirely different eyes than what they had displayed upon first meeting. Dorothea at least got the impression that none of the rest of them would be making _insinuations _about what she had done for work back in Enbarr.

…And Dorothea was surprised when that display, by itself, actually _succeeded _in winning over a few of her new neighbors. The world gained stability again when she finally got back around to the ones who weren’t impressed by the fact that she could beat up a man six inches taller than her without using magic, and she had to turn the charm back on. So she talked and she commiserated, she healed minor injuries and she utilized the few spells she knew that had the appropriate applications to perform minor household repairs. What non-food items the kids had stolen that they still had in their possession, Dorothea made them return. She just started trying to find a niche for herself, and for them.

It got to the point that soon, a few of the nearby hunters had been persuaded to take Dorothea and some of the older children under their wings, and by winter, the situation had not thawed, exactly, but some of the villagers were willing to part with some of their own food to help a group that had gotten together at the wrong time of the year to plant seeds in the ground and expect to have anything worth eating by the time the first frosts came.

It was going to be a lean winter, but one Dorothea felt they could all survive. She refused to let herself feel anything else.

The winds came and the snow came hot on their heels, and for a few days the weather was so poor that there wasn’t anything to do outside that was worth going out into the frozen hell that awaited. (Some of the kids actually _liked _the cold. There was not a world in which Dorothea could make that make sense. At least they listened to her when she told them not to go out into it right now, though Dorothea had promised to go out with them later and build snowmen as recompense. Hopefully, by then, she’d have figured out not to shiver so noticeably that they’d pick up on it.) The hearth had been cleaned and the chimney cleared of any blockages, and though thunder magic had always been more Dorothea’s forte, she knew enough fire magic that even the wettest log could be used for firewood in _this _house. At least they had warmth inside.

Stuck inside, there wasn’t really much for any of them to _do_. No books to read—Dorothea hadn’t packed any, figuring her bag was going to be heavy enough as it was, and no books in this house, and things Dorothea had needed to get for the house and its occupants a _lot _more than books—and no paper, so for now, trying to teach the kids who didn’t know how to read or write was a non-starter. When you had this many people around—Dorothea had ultimately managed to round up eleven of the monastery’s orphans—daily chores were only going to take so long. She needed thread for repairing rent clothing a lot more than she needed it for leisure activities.

Teaching them how to sing was an occasional diversion, though out of all of them, Dorothea thought only Sarmīte was really taking to the breath and voice exercises she set out for them to do. Vilmantè gave a valiant effort, but visibly struggled, and the rest of them floundered, if they were willing to try at all. Ah, well. Not everyone was cut out for this. It had been a way to pass the time.

And Dorothea wasn’t sure what kind of storyteller she’d make, but that was a way to pass the time, too.

“Sit down,” she said, sweeping her skirts as she sat with her back to the popping fire, “and I’ll tell you a story about a girl who used to sleep out with the tombstones.”

It was a bit like flaying herself open, these stories, a bit like picking at old scars until the wounds opened again and turned to pits of pus. But when the pain had passed, the old wounds felt a little smaller than they used to be.

-0-0-0-

Life went on, and on, and on. Quiet, mostly, except for the periodic attacks by bandits or the hawks and wolves that haunted the countryside. No demonic beasts, and for that, Dorothea was grateful; they’d need a fighting force a lot more well-trained and well-equipped than the local village militias to put down even one demonic beast, and a lot of them would probably still die in the attempt.

The kids were starting to put on weight, looking less like the walking skeletons some of them had seemed when Dorothea got here. Their eyes were brighter, too, and that almost mattered more to Dorothea than their no longer looking like they were about to drop dead from starvation. She’d seen dull eyes in what the puddles and fountains of Enbarr used to show her. It wasn’t anything she’d ever wanted to see in someone else.

Life went on, and on, and on. The mountains were way too quiet for Dorothea’s taste, most days—it worked in her favor if she had a headache, but otherwise, it was just unsettling—but she thought she was adapting. Not to the _cold_, of course, but to everything else, yes, at least somewhat. Life was hard, here. Life had been hard in Enbarr, too, if in different ways. What Dorothea learned now was other ways to survive all the rocks and arrows the world liked to sling her way.

Dorothea sighed as she walked the steep, winding trail back down to the village closest to her current home. Some of the local boys in the village she’d just left behind had had the bright idea that finding and trapping one of the red wolves that prowled the woods at dusk would be a great way to impress the local girls, and, well, the predictable had happened. Honestly, it could have been a lot worse. Nobody lost any limbs or digits today, and hey, some girls found scars dashing. Just not the girls in that village, who had quickly reached the consensus that they didn’t want to pass any of the stupid down to any of their potential children.

She’d gotten a little money out of the healing of those two idiots, and half a sack of flour, as well. Resources were scarce, this time of year, and Dorothea knew better than to ask for what her services were truly worth; there’d be nothing better to shatter the goodwill she’d spent a little over two years building up. If this upcoming year was like the last, they’d remember come the next harvest, and give more generously, then.

The…

Hmm. The Millennium Festival would have taken place this year, wouldn’t it have? When first she’d heard of it, Dorothea hadn’t been any more interested in it than she had been in any religious holiday or festival. Where others found meaning or at least contentment in such things, they had always left Dorothea empty. Even thinking of them now left her feeling empty. But the more people had talked about it, the more they had described the Millennium Festival as some sort of grand festival on a scale utterly unlike what Dorothea had seen thus far, the more she’d found herself becoming… curious. Reportedly, the decorations would have been beautiful. Reportedly, there would have been people from all over Fódlan gathered at the monastery.

It would have been a sight to see.

Life rarely went as planned, though. Nobody even knew where Lady Rhea was, so there definitely wasn’t going to be the Millennium Festival this year.

Oh, well. Dorothea had eleven alternately bored, excitable, and trying-to-find-trouble-where-none-previously-existed children to get back to. She could think about a Millennium Festival that would never come to pass when she got home. Kadri and Mārīte had promised to take care of supper today; she wondered what they would make.

The path Dorothea traveled was truly a steep, narrow one. She suspected it might have started its existence as a deer path, and there was in certain places little more than a foot between the unyielding side of the mountain and a dizzying, near-vertical drop down to a valley far below. Maybe, if Dorothea was very careful, she could have walked down to that valley, but she did not desire to take that risk. Break an ankle out here and, one way or another, she’d die. Dorothea had never been very good at performing healing magic on herself. This was no place to try to improve her own skills.

Dorothea was approaching a sharp bend in the path when something caught her eye from above. From about twenty feet above, from another path, from in between the branches crowned with scarlet leaves, Dorothea saw a flash of blue.

She watched, breath caught in her throat, as the source of that flash of blue stepped out from behind the trees, and passed under the light of day.

A ghost.

But a ghost would not have changed, and he… he had changed, since last she saw him.

He had changed a great deal.

Dorothea watched him as he limped on past her, struggling down a path that she knew, if he kept on it for ten or so more miles, would take him to the monastery. All the reports had said he was dead, and though those reports had clearly _lied_, he was just as clearly a wreck. Black armor gleamed in the sun, except for the parts that were streaked and pocked with lesions of rust. The blue cloak that had caught Dorothea’s attention was ragged and weather-stained. His hair was matted and overgrown, and fell over his face as he bowed his head against the bright light that shot down from the gaps in the ashen clouds overhead. He leaned his weight heavily on a tall, gory lance, and even from a distance, Dorothea could hear his labored breathing, could see with clear eyes that every step he took on unsteady feet was a struggle just to stay upright.

Dorothea opened her mouth to call out to him, but then she saw something that stopped the words in her mouth, turning them to ash on her tongue.

The side of the mountain between the path she stood on and the one he now traversed was not as sheer in some places as it was in others, but just up ahead, it was essentially completely vertical. The only way Dorothea would have been able to reach that path without going the long way around would have been if she’d been in possession of a grappling hook and a significantly greater tolerance of heights than what she currently enjoyed. (She’d not fared well with these paths, at first. The trick was to not stare too long at the drop, and not think too hard about how _Hubert _would have fared with them.) Something Dorothea had noticed with the spot up ahead was that whenever rain fell, the water would trickle down the dark stone in rivulets, crashing down to her level like a waterfall.

It had not rained in days, but there was something trickling down the rock face now.

And there was something lying on the ground, too.

When Dorothea got to it, she saw that it was an arm.

She said not one word until she got home.

-0-0-0-

It wasn’t long after that encounter in the wilderness that Dorothea began to hear the rumors.

“Did you hear?” a chandler would whisper to a goatherd. “There’s some sort of monster living in the monastery.”

Dorothea would watch them, her blood slowing in her veins as the goatherd would nod and whisper back, “I heard an Imperial patrol sent up to the monastery never came back. Not a single one of them.”

“Must be _some_ kind of monster.”

Yeah. Some kind of monster, alright.

When Dorothea and all of the children were next all in the house at the same time, she gathered them all before her and told them, “I don’t want any of you leaving this house after dark.”

Ainārs’s face screwed up. “But—“

“No ‘buts,’” she replied with a stern glare, a deep frown creasing her lips and forehead. “There’s someone up in the monastery killing everyone they come across, and that’s not that far from here. I don’t know if they’d balk at killing children—“ he’d been fond of children, once, that much she was certain of, but times changed, and who knew just how much he’d changed with them “—and I do _not _want to find out.”

Some of them paled. Kadri nodded grimly. A strange gleam entered Vilmantè’s eyes.

Dorothea went over to the door, double-checking the latch. While there, she added, “And if any of you ever see someone you don’t recognize from the village out in the woods, don’t talk to them. Just come straight home.” Her hands shook over the latch, though the chill of its rusted iron barely registered at all. “This is not a joke; just come straight home.”

-0-0-0-

Life, which had gone on and on and on, but with a slowness Dorothea had never known in Enbarr, began to move again with what was now a frightening speed.

-0-0-0-

Spring had come to Garreg Mach at last, but there was still a chill in the wind that whistled across the grounds of the monastery. The last winter had been long, and hard; it would be some time yet before it relinquished its grip in full, if it did at all by the time autumn came again. Many of the residents still went about their way wearing their coats, or cloaks, or shawls.

Dimitri was accustomed to cold far more grasping than this, to the point that the chill felt positively bracing after long enough in the sun. But he wanted someplace more sheltered from the wind when he cleaned his armor, and someplace there wouldn’t be too many…

‘Witnesses’ was the first word to come to mind that did not sour his tongue.

(It would have been no more than he deserved. Still, for this, if only this, he wanted solitude.)

The lower section of the terrace on the eastern side of the cathedral served. Few people went there these days, and the walls were high enough that the wind might sail far overhead, but rarely did it find the wherewithal to dip down into the terrace itself. The sun lit up the terrace in a pitiless blaze around noontime, but the day was past its prime, and the shadows left behind, dark and thick as ink.

Not dark enough for Dimitri not to realize when someone came to stand over where he was sitting on the ground, scrubbing away at his armor.

Several someones, actually.

Dimitri knew what he would see almost before he lifted his head. Their anger had seethed within them like boiling water, unchanged even by the sting of a quick defeat. No one would have been naïve enough to assume they wouldn’t come back eventually. Given his own experiences, Dimitri himself certainly did not qualify as ‘no one.’

Kadri. Ainārs. Valdis. He had learned their names years ago, and somehow, in all the screaming chaos, in everything that had been lost these past five years, their names had stayed with him, even though he’d not thought back on them more than once or twice since he had been forced to flee the monastery. (He should have thought on them more. He should have done _something_. The things he should have done could have filled an ocean.) The fourth was a girl whose name he did not know, a child who had always refused to come near him even back then, and she was not with her fellows now.

Dimitri set the gauntlet he had been washing on the ground as he squarely met their gazes. He did not speak. Whatever they had come here to do, attack again, shout recriminations, or something else entirely, best to let them have their shot first.

But neither did they speak. They weren’t armed, which largely ruled out the idea of an attack, but neither did their anger seem to have abated at all, though now it was amalgamated with something Dimitri could not presently recognize.

The fraught silence thickened over the next several moments, until Dimitri could finally stay silent no longer. “If you wish me harm,” he told them, “you may find yourselves standing in a very long line. Come back after this war is done, and you might find the line somewhat shorter.”

“Yeah, that’s not why they’re here,” a voice rang out. A flash of silver presaged Dorothea’s appearance at the top of the stairs, the fourth child in tow. The tone she took was light, almost friendly, but the look she pinned him with was heavy and unsmiling.

Dimitri understood the meaning of that look well enough: _If you know what’s good for you, stay right where you are. _

His gaze strayed from her face, back to the four children—but the two older ones, Kadri and Valdis, wouldn’t be children for much longer; he’d put their age at fourteen or fifteen, perhaps—all of whom looked at least somewhat mutinous. He had a feeling she’d directed the same look their way before marching them over here, only slightly altered: _if you know what’s good for you, start walking_.

Whatever was about to happen, would happen. If need be, he could round up all of these children again without much trouble. Unarmored he might be, but they _were _unarmed, and had shown no facility with magic when last they had attacked him. Dorothea might have had facility with magic, and Dimitri relatively little resistance to it, but somehow, he didn’t think that was what _she _was here for.

“Everybody, sit down,” Dorothea murmured to the four children who still insisted on standing in sullen, stony silence. “This could take a little while.”

Dimitri couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow when, without any protest or even hesitation, all four of the children she’d brought out with her sat down on the ground.

Dorothea sat down behind them (well, behind three of them; the girl who had come up with her, the girl whose name Dimitri still did not know, sat cleaving close to her side), smoothing down her skirt before heaving a sigh, that heavy look still weighting her eyes. Finally, she nodded, her eyes hardening. “I have been told that last week, there was an incident,” she remarked, to no one in particular, to everyone around to hear her. “Is that right?”

None of the four children said so much as one word; the cloud of sullen silence around them deepened to something Dimitri wouldn’t have been surprised to see spark lightning. Feeling absurdly like a child himself, and one being taken to task for unruliness, at that, Dimitri found himself saying, “There was no harm done, Dorothea.”

Judging by the way her gaze had changed from heavy and unfriendly to downright scolding, that was not particularly what Dorothea had wanted to hear. With clipped tones, “That’s not what this is about.” And just as quickly, she turned her attention back to Kadri and Valdis and Ainārs and the girl glued to her side. Rather more gently, she prompted, “Anybody want to do it?” After a moment’s silence, she went on, almost sing-song, “If one of you doesn’t do it, I’m just going to pick one of you.”

Kadri’s face screwed up like she was going to be sick, or maybe just scream. In a monotone that would have impressed the _dead _for how lifeless it sounded, she muttered, “We’re sorry we tried to beat you up.”

She didn’t sound very sorry. Even possessing less than no desire to point it out, Dimitri had the feeling that if he had pointed it out, he would have left this conversation less part of his tongue. He kept his mouth shut.

Dorothea pursed her lips. “Any reason why?”

“Because four against one is fighting dirty,” Kadri said dully.

Had this situation not been what it was, Dimitri thought he might have laughed.

Dorothea froze for a long moment, as if the words were having trouble sinking in. Then, she slapped her hand against her forehead and sighed. “Close enough.” The look she turned on Dimitri was, if possible, even heavier than the one he had first seen her wearing. “Dimitri? Anything you want to say?”

He recognized the opportunity for what it was. He would have been a fool not to. It was utterly inadequate, but he knew it, and they were here, and oh, if he was to even _try _to be something better than a beast, there was nothing to do but seize it with both hands.

And if seizing it with both hands felt like thrusting those same hands into a fire, well, that was nothing on what death felt like to the dying, was it?

“I cannot bring your parents back to you. I cannot raise the dead.” Dimitri watched as Valdis’s lips pressed into such a thin line that they nearly disappeared off of his face entirely. “I make no excuses. I acted on orders imparted to me by another, and that changes not at all the fact that you have lost your parents.” His right hand clenched into a fist; his left sat limply in his lap. “I was not thinking of what they might leave behind—“ he was never able to remember that until after the deed had been done, and awareness of all the death around him rushed back, shame racing alongside it as if it didn’t shadow his every step “—and I doubt that matters much to any of you.”

The more time wore on, the more he thought about it, the less Dimitri thought that El had factored him into any decision she had ever made. The more he thought about it, the less he thought she had ever been thinking about him at all. Now, _now_ he found himself struggling to maintain eye contact with the four who had been sat down before him, as the hatchet swing of _life destroyed by someone who wasn’t even thinking of you at all, everything you’ve ever known shattered to dust by someone who does not know or care what desolation they have made of life for you _rebounded upon him in a sudden, furious strike.

_Even when we raise our blades with the best of intentions, it still comes to this._

“This is war, and every soldier I meet on the battlefield has someone who would grieve if they were gone. I cannot promise that I will never make another orphan,” he told them softly. He would not compound the harm he had done by lying to them now, either. Jaw clenched, he went on, “I do not ask your forgiveness, but I am sorry for what you have lost.”

Those dead who left behind these orphans had been thieves and would-be killers. Why that should matter to their now-orphaned _children _was beyond the scope of Dimitri’s imagination. Any platitude about sin and expiation and just rewards for trespassing on sacred ground would have turned to ash on his tongue before they could have ever escaped his mouth. How little such platitudes would have mattered to the dead’s children was well within the scope of his imagination.

Not that what he’d actually said seemed to matter much. Beyond the faint cracks showing in Kadri’s stony visage, they’d budged not one inch.

Dorothea was regarding him with an expression that Dimitri thought might have thawed, ever so slightly. She nodded to herself, before turning her attention to the group, “Alright, you can go,” she murmured. “Professor Hanneman will be wondering where you all are before too long.”

One by one, Ainārs, Valdis, and Kadri got up and left, heading back the way they had presumably came. The fourth child clung still to Dorothea’s side, unmoving and unspeaking.

Years ago, if she’d not hid her face whenever Dimitri would come anywhere near her, she would look at him with hard gray eyes that seemed to say _I see you_. She looked upon him with those same eyes now: _I see you for what you really are._ It had always been difficult to hold her gaze for too long. He had always seen himself mirrored there far too clearly for his comfort, in more ways than one. He had a feeling she knew that. Like recognized like.

(He’d seen it in another girl’s eyes, too. There was little surprise that could be kindled within him when she’d turned her blade on him.)

But terrible as her staring gray eyes might have been to Dimitri, she was just a normal little girl to Dorothea, who bent to drop a kiss to the crown of her head without a second thought. “Go now, Vilmantè.”

Oh, so that was her name.

Vilmantè detached herself from Dorothea’s side with what could only be described as utmost reluctance. She never took her eyes from Dimitri as she did so, shoulders tensed as if she expected an attack. But eventually, she was gone as well, and Dimitri and Dorothea were left alone. What was left behind with them was a silence hardly any less fraught than when there had been four people here, rather than six or two.

Once again, Dimitri found himself the one to break it. “What was—“

“Professor Hanneman has been holding literacy classes for any of the kids around here who can’t read or write,” Dorothea said quickly. A gust of wind reached down to them, making her wince and reach up to wrap her shawl more securely about herself. “His and Seteth’s idea, and Seteth usually avoids Professor Hanneman like the plague, so that should give you a pretty good idea of just how seriously they’re taking it.” She let out a huff of a laugh, rue curdling the corners of her mouth. “I’m not that much of a teacher, myself; I was never able to make much headway with it when I tried to teach them.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

All traces of that curdled laugh died off of her face. “They’re under my care,” she said flatly. “They have been for nearly three years now.”

Suddenly, Dimitri felt sick. “I am so—“

“Oh, shut up,” she snapped. “They’re not hurt. If they were, there’s not a mortal power anywhere on this earth that could have induced me to bring them out in front of you, and you and I would be having a _very _different conversation, right now.”

Stiffly, he said, “I can imagine.”

She laughed, without humor. “It takes a lot of effort to subdue four different attackers without hurting any of them. I know that. It’s the only reason we’re having _this _conversation now.”

Dimitri had spent the entirety of that, well, he wasn’t certain ‘fight’ was the most accurate thing to call it, when none of them could land a blow heavy enough for him to even feel through his armor. He’d spent the entirety of it trying desperately to disarm and restrain them without a knife point or a sword edge winding up anywhere it shouldn’t be, struggling to hold them down firmly enough to restrain them properly without breaking any bones in the process. He had his strength back under control. Mostly. It was more difficult in battle, as it had ever been, but this had carried him all the way back to childhood, to the first (and hopefully last) time he had ever broken a sparring partner’s arm by accident during training. It had been Sylvain, and Sylvain had laughed it off and told him not to trouble himself over it, but it hadn’t been acceptable, then, and it would have been unbearable, now.

“I’ve killed men, and made killers out of their children.” (And their sisters.) The retort was not something Dimitri could honestly say tasted as blood on his tongue. He’d long since forgotten what blood tasted like. It did smell of blood, though, heavy and cloying in his nostrils, so: close enough. “I think I’ve hurt them quite enough already.”

Dorothea waved a hand in the air, letting it pivot at the wrist. “Well, I don’t think any of them have ever _killed _anyone before, so you’re wrong there. There _was _a lot of petty theft going on before I came back, but definitely no murder. I think the local villagers would have chased them out of the mountains with torches and pitchforks if they’d ever killed anyone.”

“They have it in their eyes, though.” Dimitri picked up the wash rag from the basin he’d brought out here, only to slap it back down into the water with a crackling splash and a heavy sigh. “Did you really think…” He tried to find anger, and couldn’t. All that was left where anger should have been was a cracked vessel, and through that fissure in its walls had entered tiredness. “Did you really think that would let them find peace?”

“No,” she said plainly. “I’ve never found peace that simply, myself.” An odd look stole over her face. “I don’t know that I’ve ever found peace at all, though for a time I had something that was a pretty good imitation, if it wasn’t the real thing. Peace is very fleeting,” she murmured, her voice petering out near to nothingness by the last syllable. Then, she fixed Dimitri in another heavy, unsmiling stare. “But now, you’re going to listen. No, _really _listen.” The quirk of the left eyebrow momentarily fractured the weight of her stare, but it was smoothed over just as quickly as it had appeared. “If you get up and leave, I’ll just find you later, and we can start the conversation all over again.”

Dimitri had had the odd conversation with Dorothea when they had both attended the Officers Academy, but he could not honestly say that he knew her well. She associated with Ingrid, Sylvain, and (to a lesser extent) Felix, so it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been _aware _of her outside of those occasional conversations, but still, they hadn’t been close. They hadn’t honestly been what Dimitri would call friends, even on a casual level. He did not know what to make of threats when they came from her mouth, even minor ones such as what had just been issued.

This… On reflection, it would likely be much less of a hassle to just have the conversation now. A beast might stalk away from someone who was trying to talk to them, but a man ought to at least listen. (And perhaps he was curious, as well.)

His silence and his stillness seemed to have convinced Dorothea that finding him again later would be unnecessary. She nodded sharply. “I didn’t think this was going to let them find any sort of peace with their situations. Peace isn’t that simply found—not that I need to tell _you _that; your own dramas have been conducted on a _very _public stage.” The ensuing pause stung like frostbite. “But they still needed to have that confrontation, they still needed to hear it.” She laughed bitterly. “I’m not counting on Lady Rhea to do something so basic as _apologize_. I wasn’t around her very often, but she always gave off the air of being someone who hasn’t been accustomed to apologizing for anything in a _long _time. I thought you might be different, but if not, I was prepared to deal with that, too. They needed the confrontation, no matter how it was going to turn out.”

It was easier, just then, to look down into his reflection in the basin than it was to look into Dorothea’s face. What the shivering water showed him was something gaunt and disfigured from the human form, but there was a truth in it that Dimitri thought he would not have found in a mirror. “I understand that.” And how could he not? He felt as if the knowledge was carved into his bones.

“Glad to know we’re on the same page,” she half-muttered, staring down at the hands folded neatly now on her lap. Her mouth was curled into a deep frown, the line carved so deep that Dimitri found himself entertaining visions of the lower half of her face just falling off into her lap.

Inertia seemed to be keeping her there, and the gears were turning in Dimitri’s mind, a new strain of curiosity (three years, she said?) pinning him to the spot.

This might, perhaps, be probing too far, considering that their acquaintance was limited to the odd conversation several years back when they would happen across each other in the monastery, but even if only in passing, she _had _been the one to bring it up.

“Dorothea…” He’d seen her around the orphans of the monastery more than once. Always from a distance, but he had seen her. “You said you’ve been taking care of them.”

“Yeah.”

“You left Enbarr to come care for them.”

She hunched her shoulders. “Again, yeah.”

“Why? Why do that? It can’t have been especially _safe _to live in any of the villages surrounding the monastery.” Dimitri was uncomfortably aware of a few reasons why it might not have been safe, just several months prior.

Her face screwed up, and suddenly she looked much younger than the woman who sat before him, or even the girl who had attended the Officers Academy years ago. “Why _not_? Nobody else was doing it. The whole reason they’d taken to stealing food by the time I showed up was because no one would take them in to start with. Ugh, _look_. I’ve been where they are. I spent most of my life with no one showing me any care unless I was useful to them.” Her hand shot up to the brooch holding her shawl. “Most people,” Dorothea muttered. “I wasn’t worth caring about unless I was useful, and when I wasn’t useful, I was thrown away. The opera is like that, and not just with me; it’s like that with any of the girls. Your looks fade? You’re out. Your voice changes? You’re out. You get pregnant? There’s going to be a _reckoning_, and _then _you’re out.” Dimitri watched as a pallor like the beginnings of nausea crept over her face. “And if someone attacks you and disfigures you, you’re out as soon as you can walk again, with no support.”

“I…” The opera had never really taken off as a pastime back in Faerghus. Even the nobility had little leisure time at their disposal, and Dimitri had never thought much about what it must be like to work in an opera house. This… “I was not aware that being an opera singer was such a dangerous profession,” he tried carefully, because she was looking the way he’d seen soldiers get after too much screaming and blood (the way he had gotten sometimes, himself), and treading too heavily on what might be raw wounds would both be inconsiderate and practically _inviting _assault of some kind or another.

“Heh.” Humorless laughs were usually jarring. Dorothea’s was more jarring than most. “Lucky you. Do yourself a favor, and don’t educate yourself. In particular, don’t ever ask about what happened to Sigrid Heidrich. You probably wouldn’t have that easy a time finding the information, anyways; it was hushed up pretty quickly, for Enbarr. Just take me at my word: it’s not particularly _safe_, being an opera singer. And top management does _not _care about us.” She smiled sadly. “I figured that one out by watching it happen to other people, but the lesson still stuck with me.

“And then, I came here, and for the most part, they were in the same boat I’d been in. There weren’t a lot of people who cared about them once they stopped being useful. I just…” She sighed heavily. “I just didn’t want them to grow up learning the same lessons I learned. No one should have to be useful just to be cared about.”

Dimitri wouldn’t pretend to know what that was like. It didn’t sound like any way to live, and he said so.

“Well, I’m glad we’re agreed!” and this time, the laugh that buoyed her voice was bright, almost bell-like. “I’d hate to see what a kingdom ruled by a man who thought it was acceptable to treat people that way would be like. I’ll hold you too it, too, so you had just better not forget what you just said to me.”

“I won’t,” he replied, almost smiling, and he meant it.


End file.
